UN Authority Figures

UN Women, Executive Board: Turkey

NATO member Turkey has sent hundreds of far-right extremists that it recruited under the banner of the Syrian National Army to fight in Syria. The men glory in mutilating bodies and calling women "whores."
Source: The Jerusalem Post, October 24, 2019. Photo: Screenshot of Turkish-backed fighters

Mission of the UN Women: "The main roles of UN Women are: To support inter-governmental bodies, such as the Commission on the Status of Women, in their formulation of policies, global standards and norms; To help Member States to implement these standards, standing ready to provide suitable technical and financial support to those countries that request it, and to forge effective partnerships with civil society; To hold the UN system accountable for its own commitments on gender equality, including regular monitoring of system-wide progress." (UN Women website)

Term of office: 2020-2022

Turkey Record on Women's rights:
"Violence against women, including spousal abuse, remained a serious and widespread problem both in rural and urban areas. According to public opinion polling conducted annually by Kadir Has University's Gender and Women's Studies Research Center, violence continued to be the biggest concern for women in the country with 61 percent of respondents citing the issue... the number of killings and other forms of violence against women remained high... Women's associations also charged that government counselors sometimes encouraged women to remain in abusive marriages at their own personal risk rather than break up families. Courts in some cases gave reduced sentences to some men found guilty of committing violence against women, citing good behavior during the trial or "provocation" by women as an extenuating circumstance of the crime... So-called honor killings of women remained a problem. Human rights activists and academics alleged that the practice continued across the country... Gender equality organizations indicated that incidents of verbal harassment and physical intimidation of women in public occur with regularity, and cited a permissive social environment in which harassers feel emboldened as the cause."
(U.S. State Department's Country Report on Human Rights 2018, Turkey)