MAJOR GFW Achievement
Today was a very major achievement for women and girls in Europe. I’ll let you read the internal email. This is why I work for the Global Fund For Women…
Earlier today, our CFO Liz Schaffer (my boss), accompanied by a grantee partner WAVE representative Miriam Freudenberg, met with the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Thorbjørn Jagland, and delivered our petition signatures in support of COE Istanbul Convention against violence against women.
A bit of a background:
The Council of Europe is an international organization promoting co-operation between all countries of Europe in the areas of legal standards, human rights, democratic development, the rule of law and cultural co-operation. It was founded in 1949, has 47 member states with some 800 million citizens.
Global Fund — together with WAVE, 17 women’s funds in Europe and INWF, and thousands of petition signers in English, Spanish, Russian — is calling on the COE member states to sign and ratify the Istanbul Convention which provides a groundbreaking framework to prevent, stop, and sanction the crime of violence against women. With the treaty in force, governments would be required to provide financial and human resources to implement comprehensive measures, such as setting up shelters, establishing national helplines, providing counseling services, and monitoring police conduct. As resource mobilizers for women’s rights at the local, national, regional, and international levels, women’s funds are uniquely positioned to advocate for governments’ firm commitment to allocating budgets and implementing the Convention. The women’s rights organizations, including WAVE, have lobbied for years to have the Istanbul Convention adopted. By signing the petition, Global Fund supporters are all over the world put pressure on decision makers to sign and ratify the convention, but most importantly to allocate resources for policies in support of women’s rights. Our next steps include working with our grantee partners and collaborators to use both the Convention framework and the petition signatures to engage in local, country-level, and regional level advocacy.