IJDH executive director Brian Concannon and Code Blue co-founder Paula Donovan discuss the lack of accountability within the UN and the reforms needed for victims seeking justice Story Transcript JESSICA DESVARIEUX, PRODUCER, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore. A report conducted by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services […]
Author Archives: Paula Donovan
Paula Donovan is the co-founder and co-director of AIDS-Free World. Before co-founding AIDS-Free World in 2007, Paula Donovan served as senior advisor to the UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa from 2003 to 2006. Between 2000 and 2003, she was posted in Nairobi as UNICEF regional advisor on HIV/AIDS for eastern and southern Africa, and then as UNIFEM's Africa-wide gender and AIDS advisor. Ms. Donovan worked for UNICEF at its international headquarters throughout the 1990s; she started her work in international relations as director of communications at the US Committee for UNICEF in the late 1980s. Ms. Donovan was the first to call for a UN agency devoted to women. Her 2006 position paper, Gender Equality: Now or Never, set out the need and the rationale for the agency; it became a key document in the advocacy effort to have an agency created. UN Women was ultimately established in 2011. Among her accomplishments with AIDS-Free World, Paula Donovan forced the World Health Organization to re-examine the connection between contraceptive injections and the transmission of HIV; forced UNICEF to abandon a dangerous and ill-conceived HIV scheme called "The Mother-Baby Pack"; successfully demanded UNAIDS, WHO, and UNICEF stop the use of single-dose Nevirapine; championed the quest for justice for Zimbabwean women raped during the elections of 2008; joined the fight to overcome child marriage by making it an issue of child labour; and initiated and led the campaign of eliminating immunity for sexual violence committed by UN peacekeeping personnel.