Press Conference, 13 October 2023
We are faced today by heightened threats to our global peace and security. It is clear that peace efforts are failing to bring sustainable results.
As I highlighted in my report, a recurrent mistake of past peace processes is the failure to ensure inclusivity, and to listen and address the conflict-related needs and grievances of communities and social groups, in order to address the conflict root causes.
Meaningful inclusion is key to ensure sustainable peace. For this, the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association are vital, as these rights allow communities to group and mobilise in order to push for changes, bring grievances to the decision-makers, and to alert when political and peace-making commitments are not followed through.
These rights often provide the only available option for those who live in post-conflict and fragile contexts to raise their voices; and they are an important avenue for women, victims, youth and marginalized groups, who are otherwise excluded from these processes, to voice their grievances and concerns.
We have too many examples demonstrating how the suppression of these rights and the failure to listen to the communities and social movements in the context of conflict-prevention and peace-building, led to failed peace processes.
- In Sudan: the brutal repression of pro-democracy protests by the military de-facto authorities, and the lack of meaningful inclusion of protest movements representatives, while focusing on those power holders involved in killings and repression of protests – led to serious escalation of the violence;
- In Afghanistan – women were completely sidelined from the peace process, leading to today’s dire situation of gender apartheid imposed by Taliban who were brought through closed-door US-Taliban peace deal;
These 2 most recent examples show how when civil society is repressed, critical voices are silenced, civil society and social groups are excluded from the table and decision-making, while focusing on belligerent parties, this can only lead to empowering perpetrators and resurgence of violence.
Here are some key recommendations of my report:
In order to make the investment for peace successful, States and international community, including the UN, should take decisive steps to:
- Ensure civil society is not supressed, but treated as indispensable partners for bringing sustainable peace.
- The promotion and protection of the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, should be central to all national, regional and international peace-making and peacebuilding efforts.
- To enhance the meaningful inclusion of communities and CSO in peace process, it is essential to: enable, support, respect the agency and independence of CSOs, to protect them, and strengthen timely and effective accountability for violations against CSOs actors,
- To put respect to human rights and freedoms in the centre of conflict prevention and peace processes.
- To adopt bottom-up approach, support grassroot peace movements, and ensure that the voices of diverse communities and civil society are included and reflected from the design to the negotiations and implementation of peace agreements, and in the transition process and institution-building.
Clément N. Voule
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