Episode 2: A Failure of Leadership
Paula Donovan is the co-director of AIDS-Free World, an international organization that advocates for institutional change with a focus on reforming powerful institutions’ responses to the social injustices that have allowed HIV to flourish. She has spent more than three decades working to advance women’s and children’s rights, both within the UN system — with UNICEF, UNIFEM and the Office of the UN Special Envoy on HIV and AIDS in Africa — and as a civil society advocate since she co-founded AIDS-Free World. She joins us from Boston, USA.
She speaks to us about:
working to promote mothers’ right to have control over infant feeding choices
structural injustices
the fear and stereotypes associated with the HIV crisis in eastern and southern Africa
activist movements
the failure of UN leaders to name and shame bad politicians
violence against women
advocating for the creation of a UN agency devoted to women’s issues (what came to be UN Women)
the UN System Wide Coherence Agenda
fighting to end impunity in cases of sexual abuse and violence by UN staff
the UN convention on privileges and immunities - and much more.
Editors Note: The transcript has been slightly edited for clarity and coherence.
Transcript
Intro: There are too many leaders of the UN who are so afraid that if they say anything constructively critical or outright critical about a government, if they name and shame, if they call them out individually for falling short of what they promised they would do, or of what they’re obligated to do and have signed off that they will do, if they’re called out, if they said we are against child soldiers and then UN staff or other advocates and activists on the ground report back through the media to the UN or directly to the UN that this government is using child soldiers, then there are UN leaders who are too afraid to say to a particular government, stop using child soldiers, we see you doing it, here’s the evidence, and the international community has to come down hard on you, and we’re naming you and shaming you.
Safa: Welcome back to the Rethinking Development Podcast. My name is Safa and I will be your host as we speak with and learn from practitioners of all backgrounds and affiliations around the world. In our conversations, we aim to rethink ethical behavior and best practices through the lived experiences and personal reflections of different practitioners. Our guest today is Paula Donovan. She is the co-director of Aids Free World, an international organization that advocates for institutional change. It’s high level advocacy, strategic communication and creative legal approaches focus on reforming powerful institutions’ responses to the social injustices that have allowed HIV to flourish. Ms Donovan has spent more than three decades working to advance women’s and children’s rights, both within the UN system, with UNICEF, UNIFEM and the Office of the UN Special Envoy on HIV and AIDS in Africa and as a civil society advocate since she co-founded Aids Free World in 2007. Ms Donovan was the first to call for a UN agency devoted to women. Her 2006 position paper entitled “Gender Equality: Now or Never” set out the need and the rationale for the agency and spearheaded the global effort that led to the establishment of UN Women in 2011. Ms Donovan launched Aids Free World’s Code Blue Campaign in 2015 to end impunity for sexual exploitation and abuse by UN personnel, beginning with the military and civilian personnel involved in UN peacekeeping operations. Thank you so much for speaking with us today.
Paula: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me on Safa.
Safa: Could you please tell us how you first began to work in this field and what motivated you at the very beginning of your career?
Paula: Well, I had worked for quite a long time in the NGO sector in my own country, the United States, on anti poverty programs, including what are now called women’s empowerment programs and worked towards social justice issues in the United States. And then in 1987 I had the opportunity to work for the US Committee for UNICEF, it’s now called UNICEF USA, I think, which raised awareness and funds for UNICEF programs worldwide. And that started me on my international career. I quickly turned my attention to women’s issues because it seemed that women were being ignored and or just not dealt with appropriately. Programs were very much focused in the early days when I was at UNICEF, in the late 80’s and early 90’s, the focus on the rights and well being of children very much saw women as a catalyst for children’s rights and as the enablers, as though their role in life was to make sure that the next generation was safe and healthy and well educated and so forth, and it was such a one dimensional role for women. Of course, that’s critically important, but it’s not the sum total of women’s existence, just as it’s not the sum total of men’s existence to be fathers and to prepare the next generation and protect them as they grow. So, I was very drawn to the women’s issues that were being dealt with by the UN and over time, eventually, I moved to UNICEF headquarters, to the UN agency itself, spent the bulk of my international career, my UN career, at UNICEF, again focusing on women’s issues. I was part of a small team that promoted women’s rights to choose and have control over infant feeding choices without the undue influence of the infant formula industry or health care workers who want to prescribe how women take care of their newborns and infants. And from there I moved on. Of course HIV became an issue while I was working on the infant formula industry marketing practices and trying to curb them and uphold women’s rights to be in charge of what happens with their children and their own bodies. HIV came along and the revelation, which was quite stunning for all of us, but especially for people who are working on infant feeding, that it was possible for the virus to be transmitted through breast milk — it was quite a stunning intersection for us of women’s rights and this threat of a virus being inadvertently passed from one person to another. And that’s really how I got introduced to a serious focus on HIV. That was in the early 1990’s and I’ve been focused on HIV ever since. Always with the understanding that unless we deal with women’s issues, we will never, ever be able to to address HIV in an appropriate way, because the discrimination that women face, women and girls face, throughout their lives, and that often ends in violence or sexual abuse of some kind, gender based violence and sexual abuse of some kind, it’s a serious driver of HIV and allows a virus like HIV or any other dangerous virus that comes along in the future to really thrive and continue to spread throughout populations.
Safa: I see. That’s such an interesting trajectory. In terms of taking it back to one of the earlier experiences — you mentioned working to end the promotion of infant formula in order to protect women’s right to breastfeed. At that time when you were working on that campaign in UNICEF and with other organizations, what do you think were some of the main challenges, and how do you think the campaign was able to be successful and overcome those in terms of protecting and promoting women’s rights?
Paula: So breast feeding was considered a very important element of UNICEF’s child health agenda. But there was, in those days, a very limited and sort of blind perspective on anything that had to do with women’s bodies. So actually I was mentored by some extraordinary women who had been working on women’s rights to control over their own bodies, including infant feeding and breast feeding, and together we sort of brought UNICEF around to the notion that it’s not simply a child’s right to be breast fed, regardless of what his mother’s preferences are, what his mother’s capacity is, what his mother’s beliefs are, what her mother’s abilities are, considering the rest of the life that a mother is leading, maybe limited, or she may have some serious preferences. So the idea that a child has a right to be breast fed was something that we thought of as very retrograde and it’s actually a mother that has a right, a woman has a right to decide what’s best for herself and her child. And that right has to be backed up with society’s obligation to inform women about the risks and benefits of various approaches that they’ll take to raising a child. So that was really quite a hurdle to get past, kind of persuading people who were all about, you know, defending the rights of the child to have the best possible outcomes in their lives and opportunities in their lives. And women who did not want to, or were not well enough to breastfeed were considered sort of an obstacle to children realizing their rights to the best possible infant feeding. And we had to adjust that and say no, a woman conceives and then she carries a fetus for nine months, she’s in charge for those nine months, she should continue to be in charge of this. It’s a dyad, and she should continue to be in charge because it’s really her body and her bodily functions that are determining the well being and the health and the nutrition of this child. So inform her, support her, make it possible for her to make good decisions on behalf of herself and her baby and then step out of the way and do not control her. And it’s very similar to and in line with the conversations that have been happening around the world for decades, about rights to abortion. It’s women’s bodies, and they need to make the decisions that are right for themselves and right for the people around them in their lives. They deserve information and support and then the freedom to act on their well informed decisions.
Safa: Absolutely. In that work, was there an element of having to address corporate lobbyists or corporate interests? Or was this more of a human rights based, government based advocacy type work?
Paula: More so than most things that UNICEF was engaged in and the World Health Organization (WHO) was engaged in, this was very much focused on infant formula manufacturers, so these massive companies that produce food and pharmaceuticals also produce infant formula. So Nestle, Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Myers Squibb, a whole range of of companies, mostly American based and some European based companies, food and pharmaceutical companies got involved with infant formula pretty early on after it was invented, if you will, because they saw a huge market. It was just a never ending market of consumers because children, you know, new infants are born every day, every minute, and they knew that it was a never ending supply. It’s also a terrific brand leader. So if you’re Nestle and you want people to buy Nestle products from Nescafe to Nestle crunch bars to, you know, all the other hundreds of thousands of products that Nestle has been marketing throughout its long history, what a great way to hook your consumers by introducing them with free or very low cost infant formula while they’re vulnerable, they’re at home or in the hospital but they have just given birth. They’re feeling sort of — they are in awe, but they’re also kind of overwhelmed by the responsibility they now have with this new tiny human being. And along comes a company that’s giving them all kinds of free stuff, including: here, this will be easy for you, here is some milk, you must be having trouble breastfeeding, maybe you don’t know really how to breastfeed, you’ve never done it before or you’ve encountered some problems with your last child. Here, we’ve got some bottles of formula already ready and made up for you. And here’s a cute little teddy bear and a nice diaper bag and all sorts of things and it locks people in and makes them have a great feeling about Nestle that will carry them through to the rest of their lives. This was true of formula and the food and pharmaceutical companies, they wanted people to love their brand and stick with it for life. And so they decided let’s catch these consumers basically at birth and it will be an ever expanding market. So we worked very hard to end the marketing of infant formula directly to women. We said breastfeeding should be supported, women should be informed about infant feeding and how to do it. Employers and others should support women who choose to breast feed by giving maternity leave, by providing spaces where women can breast feed, by not humiliating them or arresting them if they have to partially de-robe in order to feed a baby, that’s what nature intended. So all factions of society, all parts of society should be supportive of women who choose to breast feed. Also supportive of women who say that they can’t or don’t choose to, if they make that informed choice, but corporations should have no role in this decision whatsoever. If women choose or have to formula feed, those product should be available. But they should be available just the way any prescribed drug is available and women can get them through their health worker, through their doctor and the marketing should not be taken up by the infant formula manufacturers because they’re competing against something that’s a natural function and a natural process, and of course, breastfeeding doesn’t have a marketing department.
Safa: Very interesting. Moving on a little bit to your next role where you were UNICEF Regional Advisor on HIV/AIDS in eastern and southern Africa, a role that perhaps involves a lot of working with governments and that kind of high level advocacy work, could you tell us about that experience and maybe what are the complications or complexities that arise in trying to work with governments?
Paula: I had spent a few years at UNICEF headquarters working in the Office of the Deputy Executive Director on a whole range of issues, so had familiarity with working with governments and of course UNICEF and other UN agencies exist to assist governments and they report to governments.When the governments of the world get together within the United Nations, they decide collectively, these are our goals, these are our aims, these are our objectives, these are principles and they hammer out, you know, the sort of consensus statements that say we all can agree on X, and then they turn to the United Nations staff and personnel and the rest of the international community’s personnel to help them to fulfill those objectives. The people who are the country’s representatives to the UN, of course, are just one or two people sitting in a room banging out this convention. They can’t then go back to their countries and make sure that this new objective is reached. They need assistance with that, so they go back and their governments are gonna work towards that. But the governments are going to need help with informing the public, with drafting the kinds of legislation that might be needed, persuading people within their governments that might be resistant to this kind of change. There’s all sorts of support that’s needed to make progress, social progress, economic progress, developmental progress in the world. And that’s the role of the UN and it’s agencies, funds and programs of which UNICEF was one. Where HIV was concerned, there was a tremendous amount of discussion among governments. It was, you know, an entirely new crisis starting that was just sort of revealed to the world in the early 1980’s. It was a mystery, nobody could understand it, nobody knew how it was passed, everybody was terrified of it. And so there wasn’t a natural consensus, so working among and between and in support of governments was very contentious at times and difficult throughout the, definitely through the early decades of the the HIV epidemics around the world. Working with governments in east and southern Africa was especially challenging because there were many governments that were already sort of sidelined and not treated with the respect that they deserved. Former colonial powers were still exerting their — trying to exert some control and influence over the countries that they had once colonized in east and southern Africa. And the sort of post colonial era was filled with this tug of war between the wealthy countries and the countries whose development and wealth had been — and wealth accrual had been stymied by colonialism. So the newish democracies in east and southern Africa were evolving and emerging, along comes HIV and decimated the countries of east and southern Africa, and it was an especially terrifying dilemma or crisis, health crisis for those governments to face because, as you know, it attacked the most productive population. So a lot of massive epidemics go after the most vulnerable, physically vulnerable in populations, so babies die and the elderly die first. With HIV, this was an entirely new phenomenon. The productive working young adult population was most at risk. And so you had teachers and people within governments and, you know, the sort of educated and elite and the salary earners and the people who were heading families who were the most vulnerable and were dying by the thousands in countries and governments didn’t know how to deal with it. They were afraid of it, and they were in denial. Many countries just refused to accept or to acknowledge that HIV was a crisis. If we just pretend this isn’t happening, if we blame it on subsets of the population, if we say it’s just happening with gay men in you know, in New York and San Francisco, or we blame it on — it’s only happening with sex workers so we’ll criminalize them, then maybe this will just go away and fade away. So it was quite a role reversal. At least that’s what it felt like to me, to be working with governments and trying to — instead of saying what can I, as an international civil servant do to promote the goals that you’ve already agreed are essential and you need the assistance of the international community, instead, we were going and sort of in a position of having to very forcefully persuade governments, you must do this, you have to recognize this as a crisis, and the approach that you’re taking is wrong. Whether or not we’ll support you in your approach is not — we’re not mandated to support you if your idea of addressing HIV is to put everybody behind bars who identifies as gay or a man who has sex with men, or to criminalize everyone who uses injectable drugs. The international community is not going to support you to do that. So we became advocates at the UN, advocating with governments who were headed down a wrong path and putting their own populations in danger.
Safa: Wow, you know that fear that you mentioned, that level of fear or denial — that can be such a powerful force and can have such destabilizing effects. In terms of what elements you think really helped to overcome that, is there any approach, specific campaign or specific activity that you remember or you would say really helped governments overcome that stage of fear?
Paula: Well, I don’t actually think that it’s overcome yet unfortunately. We are much further along than we were certainly in the first decade or two decades of the AIDS epidemics, and now that science has progressed to the point where HIV is the term we use rather than AIDS, because there are now drugs available that can make this infection something that the virus enters your body but then you can control it and live with it as a chronic disease, the way you would with some forms of diabetes, if you could treat them properly or, you know, heart disease, you can control it just so long as you stay on top of it and and stick with a regime. That took away a lot of the really visceral fear of HIV because people saw fewer and fewer of their community members, family members and so forth progressing to AIDS, which is a series of symptoms, opportunistic infections and so forth that debilitate and then ultimately, the immune system collapses and the body just goes into rapid decline and people die of AIDS. People don’t die of HIV, and so it can be controlled as a chronic disease now, if you have access to the drugs that are necessary to make it such, but we’re still not at that point. There’s a tremendous — because HIV is not curable, once you’re infected, you will be infected for life. It still instills a great deal of fear in people, and it’s also associated with people who live on the margins. So if you don’t have access to those drugs that I just referred to, the antiretroviral drugs, the likelihood is you don’t have access to them because you’ve been pushed by your society to the margins for other reasons. Because you identify as a homosexual, because you have a dependency on injectable drugs, because you are part of the prison population in your country. So you’ve been marginalized, pushed to the margins or because you’re a woman and you’re considered a second class citizen. You know, you may live in a country where in order to get access to the drugs that you need, you need the permission of a male in your family, you’ve got to bring your father or your husband or your brother or in some truly overtly bizarre cases, even bringing your son along with you to a health clinic is the prerequisite to seeing a doctor and getting the prevention or treatment that you need. So we’re not past that fear stage entirely. The activist movements that have normalized homosexual relationships and that have advocated on behalf of commercial sex workers and other groups that are normally thrown to the margins have made tremendous strides in overcoming the fear. If you get rid of the fear that causes social injustice, then the social injustice will not lead directly to inequitable access to the prevention and treatment you need to address HIV, which is why my organization, AIDS Free World, looks at the margins of societies and says, how did people get there and how can people who are on the margins be pulled back into the mainstream through policy change, law changes and so forth and given the same equal access to everything that should be available to humankind or to a country’s population, how can we address the social ills that pull people, push people to the margins and then they won’t be residing on the fringes of society where they can’t deal with something like HIV when it comes along. And we include many, many, many women and adolescent girls in that group of people that are pushed to the margins and given less than equitable access to all the benefits and social justice benefits that they need.
Safa: You mentioned activist groups. There’s a bit of a tension maybe, or a relationship between social change happening through government level advocacy, through policy change or through social movements, through grassroots organizations, through activist movements. What have been your experiences in the different countries you’ve worked in?
Paula: So I think that when you see an activist movement rise up and gain strength and then come into conflict with government, what you’re seeing is an expression by a population, lets say a population of a country, an expression of betrayal and a sort of feeling that, and I think this is an entirely legitimate assessment, that the government that they elected to represent them and to carry out their will is not doing that. That individuals who have found themselves in positions of power within government have decided to move things forward in a direction that suits them rather than that suits the population they’re supposed to represent. So oftentimes people in governments, and it depends largely on the kind of government you have, whether you have a strong, vibrant democracy where people can truly choose their representatives, who will then sit in parliament, who will hold positions as prime minister or president, who will have law making roles in in a country — when you’ve got a really strong, vibrant democracy with systems of checks and balances, you can elect people, expect them to represent your consensus view, what most people in the constituency feel is the right way to proceed. And if they don’t, then you throw them out of office or you don’t re-elect them and you keep their terms short enough so you’re sure that they’re voting on behalf of you rather than for their own will. I live in the United States, and the country is in just a constant state of anxiety and turmoil because so many of us believe that a majority in the United States elected Donald Trump, who now has had four long years to basically act as president and he is abusing that authority by, I believe, pushing forward an agenda that works for him and for his friends and cronies and family members who are a very, very wealthy, tiny percentage of the population, but he’s ignoring the will of the people. So one hopes, then, that the electoral process will make sure that his term ends and that we can put in place people who truly represent us. When you’re talking about governments that are either evolving towards strong democracies or had eschewed the idea of a strong democracy like North Korea, Saudi Arabia, currently, Venezuela, where democracy has been sort of abandoned or government has decided that it will make the decisions in those countries and has taken over an inordinate amount of power, that’s where really deadly tensions arise because when civil society, so called civil society, the population expresses itself and says, we don’t like the decision that you just made, that’s not representative of what we the people want to see happen, if they do that through the media or take to the streets than a truly autocratic government can simply use their military and other might to suppress the population, oppressed them, jail them, kill them and maintain power for a tiny elite few in the government. So that’s where you see a lot of the tension arise. But I think generally uprisings, street protests, very vibrant, critical discussions through traditional mainstream and social media, these are all the hallmarks of a healthy democracy that is moving forward and trying to figure out day to day and issue by issue, what does the majority want? And how can we put our representatives in place who will make sure that we’ve got the structure to move that majority position forward.
Safa: In terms of the role of UN agencies in countries that are more democratic vs in countries that are maybe more autocratic, how do you think that impacts the work that can be done or currently what are the ways in which agencies respond to different types of government leadership?
Paula: You know, that’s actually changed Safa, since I joined the UN, since I first started working with the UN. In the 1980’s the head of UNICEF was a man named Jim Grant and he was a real visionary. And he realized that the world’s governments, at least on paper and at least when they were sitting together in the United Nations, had said that these are our goals for children, this is what we all agree should happen for children, all children should be immunized against, you know, major child killer diseases. We should devote enough of our national health budgets towards that end to make it happen, just as one example. And then UNICEF was the agency that was expected to assist with that effort, help governments that didn’t have the resources or the wherewithal or just couldn’t figure out quite how to do that and how to inform the public that that’s the goal and that was going to be the intervention that was gonna take place in the government. And when Jim Grant saw then that there were some countries that left the UN meeting after signing off on yes, this is what we all agree should happen, let’s get to it, when they went home and said, yeah, you know, actually, I’m not that concerned about immunization, I signed off on that just to get out of the room or to look good. But I’m much more interested in putting that money that should go to children’s health towards my army, because I’m afraid that I’m gonna be thrown out of power and I need a strong army to support me. Or I’m gonna put it into the extractive industry that I have shares in and will make me a wealthy person or whatever. So when that happened, and of course it happened quite often and to varying degrees, then Jim Grant would mobilize his staff worldwide, his UNICEF staff, to put pressure on those countries, to expose them, do what’s now called name and shame them, to say here’s what you agreed to do and here’s what our staff on the ground are seeing that you’re actually doing so, you know, you have to walk the talk. And there were publications like Progress of Nations that listed governments in rank order, whether or not they’re actually living by their commitments all the way down to flouting them entirely. And that would provoke other governments to, once they’re in the room together again or when they’re in regional meetings, to use peer pressure and say, you know, to the governments that weren’t holding their own and not doing right by their citizens, come on, you agreed to do this as an international community, you know, if we’re gonna do it, you have to do it, and it’s good for the world. Over the years since then, there have been quite a few relatively weak leaders who have been put in positions at the United Nations, in high positions, who are just afraid that — it’s a kind of twisted, twisted logic that’s hard to follow, but I can sum it up most simplistically by saying these agencies’ funds and programs of the UN and the UN itself, depend mainly on governments for their survival because the governments have to contribute the budgets to keep these agencies going. Of course, the governments are contributing budgets to keep the agencies going so that the agencies, I am using the catch all term UN agencies, but the UN and its agencies can support the governments. But at the same time, these UN agencies are employers, right. So if you’re UNICEF, you’ve got staff, you want more staff, you want to do more stuff, you wanna hire more people, you wanna hire the people you want to hire, and you want to hire a lot of support staff who can, you know, make things go smoothly and so forth. So you’re running essentially a company, even though it’s a not for profit company, and you rely on governments to give you money. There are too many leaders at the UN, and I believe Antonio Guterres, this current Secretary General is one of them, who are so afraid that if they say anything constructively critical or outright critical about a government, if they name and shame, if they call them out, you know, individually for falling short of what they promised they would do, of what they’re obligated to do and have signed off that they will do, if they’re called out, i they said we are against child soldiers and then the UN staff or other advocates and activists on the ground report back through the media to the UN or directly to the UN that this government is using child soldiers, then there are UN leaders who are too afraid to say to a particular government, stop using child soldiers, we see you are doing it, here’s the evidence and the international community has to come down hard on you, and we’re naming you and shaming it. So that tendency to do that, that feeling that that’s part of the UN’s responsibility has faded and been subsumed by this fear that the UN will loose funding from governments and then lots of UN officials will be out of jobs.
Safa: The way you put it is so clear and the fear that comes with loosing funding or saying something that can cause a backlash for the organization — on one hand, it’s understandable, on the other hand, it creates such problems and continues to allow behavior that shouldn’t be happening to continue. Do you see that this comes down to leadership and personal integrity or personal choices or — it’s quite complicated, right?
Paula: It is, yes, and I do. I absolutely see this as a failure of leadership. I think that that the UN has principles and goals and an ideology that I entirely support. And my colleagues at Aids Free World and even our Code Blue campaign is focused on ending the impunity that the UN gives to its own personnel when they commit sexual exploitation, abuse, harassment, any kind of sex related so called misconduct. Still, the Code Blue campaign, which is part of Aids Free World overall, and all my colleagues and I agree that the UN is in principle — the UN and multilateralism are absolutely essential, and those principles are ones that we uphold and and we are prepared to defend and the problems arise when you put people in place, often their nominees, people who were nominated by their governments or elected by a group of governments that have decided to get behind a particular candidate and put that person or those people in leadership positions, even though they don’t deserve to be leaders. They have no leadership skills and they have no courage, and they don’t have the courage of their convictions, the way we do at Aids Free World, they don’t have the courage to stand up and say I believe in the UN and I believe in what’s on paper, and I believe in the UN Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights and so forth, and I’m going to speak up and speak out whenever I see violations of those principles. There are far too many really weak leaders at the UN, in all kinds of positions who have lost sight of that and just think of it as sort of a job that gives them credibility and respect and gets them into important meetings and gives them quite a bit of power and authority, and they want to hang on to that even if they’re not fulfilling the goals of ensuring that the UN’s best ideals are fulfilled.
Safa: Can we speak a little bit about your 2006 position paper, Gender Equality: Now or Never. Could you tell us about the process of preparing that paper and what happened between then and 2011 with the creation of UN Women?
Paula: So I was working, as you noted earlier, I was based in Nairobi and I was the UNICEF Regional Advisor on HIV in east and southern Africa. And at the time it was frequently said that AIDS had a women’s face, that everywhere you turned, the AIDS crisis was very much identified as a crisis for women. They were creeping up to be the most affected population in east and southern Africa. The rates of infection started to be high among men and lower among women and then rapidly women became equal in that one regard and then exceeded men. So the rates of infection were higher in women, but also women were bearing the burden of HIV. They were the caregivers, they were the ones who were taking care of the sick and heading families that had lost their chief breadwinner. When a father or the males in a family, in a very male identified or male centric society where only the men could go out and get full time jobs and make money, and the women stayed home, when the men were dying, the women were then left to fend for themselves and their families. And they did all the care giving. At a time when when AIDS was affecting just about every family and most communities throughout east and southern Africa, whether it was your immediate family or your distant relations, definitely people in your community, everybody knew someone who was dying, who was infected by and dying of AIDS or had died. All the burden fell on women, and the UN wasn’t addressing it. It just didn’t have the sort of ideology or the framework or the way of thinking — again, these fallible staff members, many of whom were, you know, not feminists, thought of women as the support staff sort of, and men as the people who make the decisions and run the world. And so they just were ill prepared for this shift in societies where women needed the support. But they were also, you know, sort of really central to solving the HIV crisis and preventing its spread, to themselves and to others and, of course, to do their babies, when the mothers became infected. So it really put in kind of the most stark possible terms, it showed the weakness of the UN and the international community to deal with women and, you know, deal with one half of the population that had always been sidelined and not considered equal too. Now suddenly, they were having to find ways to interact with women that they had only had experience doing with the male half of the population, and they were failing miserably. And then, of course, there were the needs and prerogatives for women that were specific to women. You know, sexual and reproductive health and rights and that sort of thing, maternal mortality, these are issues that only women were dealing with, and the UN just wasn’t responding because they didn’t have the departments, they didn’t have the specialists, they didn’t have the experts, they didn’t have the expertise to deal with women’s issues. So I left UNICEF and moved for one year to UNIFEM which was at the time a department of the United Nations Development Program. And that to me was symbolic of just how the UN looked at women and women’s issues. There was a full agency for children, the biggest and best funded agency within the UN system was UNICEF, the agency devoted to children’s issues. There was an agency for refugees, for food and agriculture, one for emergency food supplies, the World Food Program, one for development. These subsets of the human population all had their own agency with their own UN experts and officials and budgets and so forth, a dedicated agency. And women were consigned to a department within UNDP. The head of UNIFEM was not allowed to go to the meetings of the Chief Executives of the UN, the highest ranking members, the head of, you know, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the High Commissioner for Refugees, the Executive Director of UNICEF, the Director General of the International Labor Organization. These were all the top dogs at the UN and they convened in a Chief Executive’s board and made decisions with the Secretary General on behalf of the whole UN system and the head of UNIFEM, the one entity that was responsible for women’s issues, couldn’t go to those meetings because she wasn’t high enough level. She was only the Director level, there were two or three levels above her. And so she wasn’t high ranking enough to be in those positions. So if she had things that she wanted to raise at that meeting, she would have to go to her boss, the head of the UN Development Program, the Director General who was a man, and she would have to go to him and say, could you please raise these issues, you know, at the Chief Executive’s board for the United Nations? And it was like a metaphor for, you know, the wife having to go to the husband and say the children need new shoes, please, please, can you give us enough? Give me enough money to buy new shoes for the kids and the husband would say yes or no, depending on, you know, he was just in charge. So that seemed absolutely wrong. Also, there was another body like that. There was the Chief Executive’s Bureau for the Board for the UN and there was also a group of UN agencies that were focusing specifically on HIV and that was the Joint Program on HIV and AIDS, it was made up of at that time, I think it was seven UN agencies that were particularly affected by and had to address HIV. So again UNICEF, UNDP and so forth and again there was no one representing women’s’ issues because the head of UNIFEM, the entity within the UN that dealt with women’s issues, was not high enough ranking to sit at the Program Coordinating Board meetings of UN AIDS. And so these sort of structural injustices and irrational decisions that were made on a bureaucratic level were reflective of how the UN was dealing or not dealing with women’s issues. And so I began to advocate for having a separate agency just for women that would be as big and as strong and as filled with experts and funding as UNICEF and have that for women, half the global population, of course. And then I saw an opportunity when the then Secretary General Kofi Annan took on a reform agenda and said that, you know, the member states of the United Nations wanted the UN to become more efficient and effective and coordinated and cohesive and so he started this big push called the UN System Wide Coherence Agenda. And he said, we’re gonna focus on emergencies and humanitarian assistance and development and that was a 3 legged stool. And I wrote this paper and we submitted it, I was working then for the Office of the Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa, who was Stephen Lewis, my former colleague at UNICEF, and he was working as a Special Envoy. I wrote the paper and I asked him to present it to Kofi Annan, and we together presented the idea to the panel headed byJens Stoltenberg, the then Prime Minister of the Netherlands. So we presented this paper to the high level panel that was reforming the UN and said this 3 legged stool of reform needs a 4th leg in order to be a sturdy chair, and that leg is reforming the way the UN deals with women’s issues, and we’re saying that the United Nations needs an agency dedicated entirely to women. We then approached different women’s organizations, NGOs that deal with women’s issues and in particular, one of the first people I approached was Charlotte Bunch who was a well known women’s advocate based in the United States that worked at the UN for years, or worked around the UN, pressing the UN on gender and women’s issues for years. And I sold the idea of a women’s agency to Charlotte Bunch. And she mobilized the women’s organizations that she was working with and had been for decades. And so, sort of a movement started to build and loads of people said, forget it, this will never happen, the UN doesn’t add agencies, it’s trying to trim itself down, and the UN doesn’t change. They started up in the 1940’s and it stayed that way ever since, so give up. But we didn’t. The Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis and I then moved on, started our own organization, AIDS Free World, together and we co-directed it, and that became one of our first agenda items, our strongest advocacy pushes at the beginning was we were just relentlessly going and meeting with UN ambassadors and with civil society organizations and people within the United Nations, pressing and pressing for a separate UN agency for women and in 2011 the General Assembly passed it and opened the doors of UN Women.
Safa: Fantastic, what a journey and an accomplishment. So now in 2020 when you look at the work that UN Women has done or is doing, does it reflect the vision that you had at the beginning?
Paula: I think UN women is sort of like the countries that emerged from colonialism. It’s way behind where we would want it to be. And it’s certainly nowhere up to speed with the agencies that have been around for much longer. You could see that as a disappointment, or you could see it as a step in its evolution. And I, mainly for emotional psychological reasons, I think I like to see it as glass half full, and it’s working its way up there. It is, unfortunately, it’s still not anywhere near as out spoken as the agencies of the past were, and there’s a timidity there and a lack of really forceful leadership that I think is lamentable. But eventually it will grow into its own. And if it gets a leader that truly knows how to lead and isn’t constantly looking over her shoulder wondering, will I be, you know, given a second term? You know, am I offending any governments? If you have a real visionary leader, I think it will become what it what was designed to be.
Safa: I see. Yes. So you went on to found Aids Free World with Stephen Lewis and one of the campaigns that you have is the Code Blue campaign to encourage action against impunity or lack of action taken in cases of sexual violence committed by UN peacekeeping personnel. Could you tell us about what led to the creation of that and what the main challenges have been in terms of trying to change a work culture or experiences of impunity in such cases?
Paula: Sure, so we launched the Code Blue Campaign in 2015 and it was based on the years of accumulated understanding of the UN and the way it operates and its approach towards women’s issues, including sexual violence, and first and foremost, the way that it addresses or doesn’t effectively address sexual violence. We were aware that the UN does a fairly good job of documenting sexual violence, used to do a better job, of convening meetings of women and others who are concerned about violence against women, getting governments together to sign the Beijing Declaration for Action at the last World Conference on Women, which is 25 years ago, it does a good job of documenting how much sexual violence there is and intimate partner violence in the world, country by country and documenting its consequences, and the laws that are or aren’t in place and that sort of thing. So people think the UN is the gold standard for sexual violence and exploitation and where abuse of women and girls are concerned. The reality is that internally the UN, as I was speaking before about the fact that UN agencies are filled with international civil servants and other national staff who are supposed to be fulfilling the will of the governments, but they are also an employer. And so when you work for UNICEF you are part of an unemployment group and you’ve got a boss, and your boss has a boss and so forth, and as an employer, the UN is very protective of its own personnel. Again, it doesn’t want to have a bad reputation that would cause any government to withhold funds because the governments don’t have to give any particular amount of money beyond their UN dues, they don’t have to contribute millions or billions to to the UN and its different funds, agencies and programs. So these entities of the UN are always trying to impress the donor governments and compete with one another and other entities for funding. So they don’t want it to be known that within their own ranks, within their own employment base, there are people who are using their UN power and authority and position of control in a work space or in a country situation where they’re posted to take advantage of, to sexually exploit, abuse and even commit sexual violence against women and children. The UN doesn’t want anyone to know about this problem, much like the Catholic Church didn’t want anyone to know when when they were aware that they had a global problem decades ago. And they’re more capable than the Catholic Church or any other entity of keeping it silent, because there is this provision that was put in place when the UN was first created, that’s called UN Immunity and the principal was that if we’re all going to be working together towards common goals, once the UN and it’s agencies, funds and programs get to work in different countries, it’s not gonna just be the nationals of that country who will work for the UN in Slovenia or something, we will have international staff moving from one country to another, in and out of countries and regions and making sure that the collective will of the UN is fulfilled. And in order to do that freely, without fearing that some country that was angry at the fellow members of the General Assembly for passing some resolution that they disagreed with, or some country that had been named and shamed and was angry at the UN, the UN community didn’t want that angry country to be able to retaliate against the UN by say arresting a staff member from UNICEF and saying, we’re gonna hold this guy hostage, we’re gonna claim that he is guilty of committing some crime in our country and that will teach you, and we will exert our influence by saying we will endanger UN staff if you don’t abide by our wishes and change — they would retaliate. So in order to prevent that from happening, the first people who created the UN came up with a convention on privileges and immunities which stated that people who are officials of the UN can move freely among and between countries and they can’t be detained by governments in those different countries, they can’t be arrested, they can’t be subjected to legal process, including sent to court or put in prison and that’s the basic immunity. Unless in some cases, okay, you can’t can’t have somebody who’s just a crazy psychopath who somehow gets a job at the UN, goes to a country that’s foreign to him, starts killing people, we can’t just let him get away with that, immunity won’t apply to him. So in that case, the government will go to the Secretary General and say, look, we’d like to detain this person and bring him to court, and we believe he’s a serial killer and the Secretary General could waive the immunity. That was when the UN was tiny, you know, it was just a few hundred people. The UN has exploded in size since then. Peacekeeping was invented and put in place. Peacekeeping involves not only UN personnel, the people who are employed by the United Nations, but also armies and military who are contracted from different countries to dawn a blue helmet or blue beret and act as UN soldiers and police. It’s grown to, you know, a massive global entity of 200,000 plus personnel and immunity, direct or extended immunity applies to now to this huge group of people and over the years, between what I first described when that convention was put in place and today, what’s happened is immunity has been misused and abused and has been sort of fashioned into something that allows the UN to say, if anyone whose associated with the United Nations directly, whose employed by the United Nations directly or whose government has been contracted as a peacekeeping, troop contributing country, if they commit misconduct, sexual misconduct of any kind, we will handle it internally or the government that contributed those troops handles it internally within their own military. And the government where this infraction occurred will not be involved. And that has led to a situation where the UN is allowed to simply dismiss complaints about sexual exploitation and abuse by women and children, primarily women and children in peacekeeping countries. When they report that some of the troops that have contributed to the UN and are paid by the UN to protect, to deal with peace in that country are actually turning against the population, the UN can dismiss it out of hand or just sort of slow things down and not deal with it directly and keep it very quiet. And when its own personnel, it’s non-military personnel are accused of gross misconduct, sex offences and abuse and so forth it gets to deal with it itself. Its the police, its the investigative arm, its the judge, its the jury, it doles out the punishment, and basically, what it does is quietly deal with stuff internally, keeping things out of the news, not letting anybody outside the UN know what’s going on, know how slowly they’re dealing with it or how dismisses they are, or how bad their investigations are. And in the end, if they decide that there’s just a tremendous amount of evidence against this particular wrongdoer, the worst they do is get rid of them. They fire him, they send him out to the world and he can get a job somewhere else. It is a standard that is so far below the gold standard that people think of when they think the United Nations, of the ideals that the United Nations upholds and they see what the United Nations says about discrimination against women, violence against women. But the way they act is so different. So our objective is to take this out of the United Nations and make sure that sexual exploitation and abuse is no longer handled internally as a private matter, but is actually dealt with externally by independent entities that have the wherewithal and the expertise and the non bias to address these issues and report directly to the member states of the United Nations rather than to the chief employer, the Secretary General.
Safa: Absolutely. That’s such important work. Do you feel that the global campaigns around #metoo and global conversations about violence against women, have they affected anything in terms of progress been made?
Paula: At this moment in time, the #metoo movement has served one purpose for the UN. And that is, I think, to underscore just how different the United Nations is from any other entity or part of the world. So it’s different from all churches and mosques and religious organizations. It’s different from every industry. It’s not the same as Hollywood. It’s not the same as government, parliaments and other government bodies. All of the tech industry, you know, everyone has been grappling with #metoo, and understanding that women are becoming more and more individually and collectively emboldened to speak up about these abuses that we have suffered forever, with the exception of the UN. And because of UN Immunity and because the UN has this lock on its personnel, it’s uniquely positioned to keep women and victims silent. And there’s absolutely no recourse for people who work with the United Nations. If you’re assaulted, sexually assaulted, as some people who have turned to the Cold Blue Campaign for assistance, like Martine Brostrom at UN AIDS, you’re sexually assaulted by a UN official, there is not a thing that you could do to bring that case to court and make sure that that UN official faces justice, unless and until the Secretary General waves his immunity. And since the Secretary General, particularly the current Secretary General, all of them, but particularly this one, who was already in power when the #metoo movement was born, he is completely disinclined to waive the immunity of his personnel. Then people at the UN know that it’s just futile to report, and you certainly have people who are vulnerable, people in countries who are relying on UN personnel for support, for protection, whatever it is, they know that they have absolutely no recourse and there will be no justice. So they don’t even bother to report. So the UN is unique in the world in being able to stay mired in the 1940’s, stuck in place, and women and victims and survivors are unable to push it forward because of the structure that includes immunity and includes a prohibition against freedom of information.
Safa: That’s just so shocking and unacceptable, really. But so often in these conversations, the violence or the discrimination that exists in societies that organizations are trying to address, actually is also reflected within the organizations and within people and within ourselves. But in this case especially, it seems so, so terrible.
Paula: Yeah, we hold the UN very high on a pedestal, and it just doesn’t deserve to be there in this instance. The Code Blue Campaign, my colleagues and I at Aids Free World, and everybody who is working on the Code Blue Campaign, we’re not trying to destroy the UN, we’re trying to ensure its continued survival because this will be its undoing. It will. If it doesn’t catch up to the modern world and change the way it addresses this crucial crisis, this ongoing crisis, then people will start to view the UN not as an entity that solves problems created elsewhere in the world and supports governments to solve the problems of climate change and environmental degradation and income inequality and the oppression of marginalized groups and prevention of genocide and those sort of things. Those things that the UN can and should be famous for, are all problems that the UN helps to solve in the world, and instead this one, this problem, which is a problem that the UN creates and then exports, its own personnel are creating this problem of sexual exploitation, abuse, harassment, violence, committing it with impunity. They’re exporting people throughout the world who do this and get away with it, and we fear that the UN will become best known for its achilles heels, its weakest point rather than for all the good that it can do.
Safa: Let’s hope that campaigns like Code Blue and other movements can help with changing this dramatically.
Paula: Yes.
Safa: As a final question, is there anything you’d like to add in terms of reflections on the international development industry in general, or the issues that are important to you in terms of what you think the future holds or what more should be done?
Paula: Our sincere hope is that the UN will become a leader rather than perpetrator of offences against women and discrimination against women and violence against women. And will realize that institutional change is absolutely essential for the good of the planet, so that the UN can survive and thrive and do its job in all aspects of human development and peace and security. And we’re just hoping that that will happen sooner rather than later, so that the United Nations doesn’t self destruct because of its narrow view of how to deal with women’s issues and violence.
Safa: Absolutely. Thank you so much for speaking with us and sharing your thoughts and reflections. We really appreciate it and have learned a lot. So thank you.
Paula: Thank you Safa.
Safa: Thank you to our listeners. To keep up with our podcast episodes, you can tune in on iTunes, Spotify and Google podcast platforms, and you can also follow us on Instagram, where our handle is @rethinkingdevelopment. If you have any listener questions that you would like me to ask any future guests, please feel free to email them to us. I look forward to continuing similar types of conversations with you in the weeks to come. Until then, take care.
