A/HRC/42/24
adequately resourced, funded and prioritized, including to reveal accountability gaps and
impact on service delivery.
77.
Experts also emphasized the importance of accountability for how funding is
allocated in humanitarian settings to ensure better alignment between upholding health and
human rights. Funding prioritization can often reflect national priorities more than the lived
experiences, demands and needs of affected women and girls. Moreover, there does not
seem to be any clear obligation on donors wishing to divest or defund to sustain their
funding, despite the significant potential harmful impacts on affected populations’ sexual
and reproductive health and rights and the means by which they can be realized.
78.
The role of the United Nations human rights staff can add value and new
perspectives to humanitarian action and help ensure rights-based accountability. Human
rights investigative bodies of peace missions, for example, monitor and analyse the
situation of human rights in a given context, document violations, analyse trends and
provide recommendations on legal and administrative procedures and mechanisms to
ensure remedial action and redress. They can also form part of or participate in the cluster
system in humanitarian settings.
79.
However, such bodies may also face a number of challenges, including mandate
limitations; a lack of resources, including access to humanitarian funds, limited capacity to
engage in humanitarian responses and few field actors with expertise in bringing in a
human rights-based approach to help shape interventions; and the frequent deprioritization
of women-specific issues in such settings.
80.
It was also noted that, besides peace missions, human rights advisers in the offices
of humanitarian coordinators or as part of United Nations country teams can play a key role
in emergencies, including supporting humanitarian actors to integrate a rights-based
approach, as well as identify human rights risks in response plans and programmes. In this
context, experts also suggested similar frameworks to strengthen “human rights integration”
in the humanitarian program cycle such as the Inter-Agency Standing Committee Gender
Standby Capacity (GenCap) project, which deploys gender advisers on short notice to
support coordination and response in the initial stages of humanitarian emergencies,
providing guidance on how to integrate gender into humanitarian funding proposals and
plans.
81.
United Nations human rights mechanisms, such as treaty bodies and special
procedure bodies and their wealth of country reviews, thematic reports, jurisprudence and
interpretative guidance on sexual and reproductive health and rights, also play an important
role. It was further highlighted that these mechanisms can help shift the narratives and
articulate what accountability for sexual and reproductive health and rights in these settings
looks like. For example, direct engagement in a cluster meeting by a special procedure
mandate holder during a country visit brings a new perspective and helps shift perspectives,
which in turn can advance implementation of a rights-based approach.
82.
Other mechanisms also exist at the global level, including newly established
commissions of inquiry and fact-finding and monitoring missions. Experts highlighted the
unique opportunity to explore how sexual and reproductive health and rights can be
integrated systematically into their work. Experts also drew attention to the work and
upcoming report on humanitarian settings of the Independent Accountability Panel for
Every Women, Every Child, Every Adolescent, established by the Secretary-General to
monitor implementation of the Global Strategy on Women’s, Children’s and Adolescent’s
Health (2016–2030).
83.
One good practice example was also shared by experts of a national inquiry on
sexual and reproductive health and rights conducted by a national human rights institution,
which highlighted that humanitarian responses in certain disaster affected-regions of the
country in question did not include sexual and reproductive health, despite the displacement
of women and girls and evident need.
84.
At country level, when it comes to remedy and redress, the focus should go beyond
gender-based violence. Dedicated analysis of what is actually happening on the ground in
terms of the accountability of the State, humanitarian actors and the humanitarian system
14
Select target paragraph3
Connect to a paragraph
Connect to an entity
Disable highlights
Add to table of contents