The Commissioner for Human Rights received gender expert Linda Wirth

Elmira Suleymanova, the Commissioner for Human Rights received Linda Wirth, a leading gender expert visited Azerbaijan to help the UN agencies on how to mainstream gender into all UN programmes and operations.

 The Commissioner noted gender is an important part of human rights and informed the guest about the work carried out by her Office for protection of the rights of women and promoting gender equality.

She stressed the importance of improvement of existing legislation on gender issues, clearly setting out of implementation mechanisms in legislative acts, building the capacity of women working in local executive and local enforcement bodies, fostering woman entrepreneurship, holding awareness raising event in regions by ensuring mass inclusiveness, as well as specialized trainings, regular courses on gender issues and woman rights, organizing community based services, holding meetings in communities with participation of women themselves, etc  . She also said that she had proposed to hire women to the police which can lead to more sensitive approach to domestic violence issues.

She also highlighted the importance of coordinated cooperation with UN agencies for protecting human rights and ensuring gender equality.

Linda Wirth thanked the Commissioner for such detailed information, appreciated her activity, proposals and recommendations in this field. She said that gender issue is very important for the UN, thus it is necessary to learn specificity of each country in order to integrate gender into all activities of UN agencies.