You Are Missing The Full Picture Campaign

September 2018

The campaign “You are missing the full picture” aims to highlight the international community’s very gender blind approach to Libyan women’s right in meaningfully participation in the political and peace building process. Since 2014 the international community, especially the UN mission to Libya (UNSMIL), became the main leading actor on facilitating, mediation and designing the peace building process in Libya. Despite the leadership role of UNSMIL on organizing the high level political meetings, Libyan women were barely present in any of these meetings. This campaign was designed to show examples of the most important meetings organized or attended by a number of states and UNSMIL, to illustrate the limited efforts being made to include women in such important political meetings. So, the message which the campaign aims to deliver is that “all Libyan national issues are pure Libyan womens’ issues, and vice versa, Libyan women’s issues are Libyan national issues.” As such, calling on the UNSMIL and states to truly implement international law relevant to women’s rights, through supporting meaningful inclusion of Libyan women in the whole peace process, makes absolute sense.

This advocacy campaign came as part of a bigger project that is mainly based on national consultations implemented on national level to cover all main parts of Libya. The purpose of the project is to feed into the peace building and women, peace and security (WPS) strategy in Libya. We took the chance to launch our campaign officially at the side event of 39th session of the human rights council in Geneva (HRC39) on Libya.

The approach of this campaign was through several advocacy missions with many international actors started with meeting the Italian mission to Geneva on light of HRC39 to advocate women’s inclusion in the upcoming high level meeting on Libya to be in Palermo in November 2018. As well as meeting with British, Swiss, Dutch and Canadian representatives to Libya to push for women’s inclusion. This campaign also sparked mobilization movement and advocacy among the Libyan women politicians and activists on the national level that resulted the establishment of “Libyan Women Coalition” that aims to push for women meaningful participation in all formal and informal peace and political processes.

We also sent out two newsletters to all the international community actors related to Libya highlighting the gender gap and calling for women’s inclusion.

The first newsletter in Oct 2018 here.

The second newsletter in Nov 2018 here.