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Statement by Ambassador Yoshifumi Okamura
Deputy Permanent Representative of Japan to the United Nations

At the Annual Session of the UN-Women Executive Board

30 June 2015

 

Mr. President,

 

          First of all, I would like to commend His Excellency, Mr. Ib Petersen of Denmark, for his strong leadership as the President of the Board. I also welcome and support the excellent statement just made by Executive Director Ms. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and would like to express our appreciation for her dedicated work.

 

Mr. President,

 

          The year 2015 marks the 70th anniversary of the inception of the United Nations. This year also, we have set before us an ambitious goal of adopting of the new Post-2015 Development Agenda.

 

          In this context, let us take a look at the gender equality and the empowerment of women this year and beyond. To begin, 2015 will be a landmark year in which we celebrate both the 20th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, and the 15th anniversary of Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security.

 

          Japan appreciates UN-Women’s dedicated efforts to press the issues of gender equality and the empowerment of women around the world.
We know that gender-related issues and perspectives are now being mainstreamed and incorporated into various activities of the UN, including, for example, in the “High-level independent panel report on peace operations” and the “UN high-level panel report on the Peacebuilding Commission”.

We are gratified to see UN-Women taking on greater responsibility for advocacy in this field.

 

          I would like to take this opportunity to commend the success of the HeForShe Campaign by UN-Women. In this connection, I am very happy to let you know that our Prime Minister, Mr. Shinzo Abe, a long-time member of HeForShe, was selected as one of the “Impact 10X10X10” this month.

 

          Furthermore, I’m glad to inform you the Prime Minister Abe will once again take the initiative to hold the second symposium of the “World Assembly for Women: WAW! Tokyo 2015” in August. To ensure the success of this year’s symposium, we expect the Executive Director’s participation and contribution. Prime Minister Abe is looking forward to seeing you again.

 

Mr. President,

 

          Japan welcomes the first report on the progress made in the implementation of the strategic plan, 2014-2017.  

 

          In particular, Japan is looking closely at the field of Women, Peace and Security. Japan is a core member of the Global Acceleration Instrument for Women, Peace and Security and Humanitarian Action (GAI) as well as one of the co-chair countries of the Global Study.
In this capacity, Japan will continue to support UN-Women for the further progress of implementation in this plan.

 

          As to Japan’s financial support, in spite of our continuing severe fiscal circumstances, this year our contribution to UN-Women reached nearly 20 million USD in total. For donor countries, it is very important to think about tax payers.
Therefore, serious efforts should be made to gain the support and understanding of tax payers when it comes to budgetary assistance. That’s why we would like to encourage UN-Women to assure accountability among its projects.

 

          In the same context, we invite UN-Women, which is still a relatively new UN organ, to advertise further its effective activities and sucees stories of mainstreaming the gender equality.

 

Mr. President,

 

       Let me take this occasion to make a remark on UN-Women’s evaluation system. Japan keeps a close eye on evaluations, and appreciates the fact that UN-Women is focusing on the evaluation system as well. I would like to remind you that tireless efforts for improvement are always necessary.

With particular regard to the issue of women’s economic empowerment, we believe that concrete outcomes are still needed to ensure real advancement of women’s status.
In this regard, we appreciate the report on the corporate evaluation of the contribution of UN-Women to women’s economic empowerment. The five recommendations provided by the report are all very relevant. Japan encourages UN-Women to steadily implement these recommendations.

 

          Once again and lastly, I assure you Japan, as a member of the Board since the inception of UN-Women, will continue to contribute positively to the work of this Board and take a lead in this important field.

 

I thank you, Mr. President, and wish you all great summer vacation.