FOREWORD Empowering women and girls, and specifically those living in rural areas, means supporting women and girls to claim their human rights and to ensure that such claims resonate with state actors. National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) contribute to women’s empowerment through their unique mandate and powers. Important instruments are NHRIs’ monitoring reports and their advice to their national parliaments and governments, as well as their awareness-raising and human rights education activities. The present report showcases how NHRIs use their mandate and powers to promote and realize the rights of women and girls in relation to this year’s priority theme at the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). The report illustrates how NHRIs engage in a variety of situations, identify the problems that women and girls in rural areas face, how they contribute to understanding these problems as human rights issues, and how they help resolve them in a humanrights compliant way and with the participation of women and girls. NHRI are independent state institutions established by national law or constitution and mandated with the promotion and protection of human rights, including women’s rights, in and by their own countries. They enjoy a broad human rights mandate, which enables them to take up any human rights situation in their country. Thus, NHRIs are an essential component for strong national human rights protection systems and over the past years the number of NHRIs worldwide has grown. Today, there are 77 NHRIs that fully comply with the UN-recognized standard for NHRIs, the Paris Principles (A/RES/48/134)1, and 33 NHRIs are partly compliant with this standard, working towards full compliance. NHRIs are also essential in order to establish constructive exchange and useful links between the international and domestic human rights systems, thereby closing a critical implementation gap: they are mechanisms to support states in the national application of international standards, with full understanding of the local context; and they can independently report to international bodies, such as the UN Human Rights Council, Treaty Bodies and the Universal Periodic Review, on the human rights situation on the ground. The General Assembly endorsed Paris Principles establish a specific responsibility for NHRIs to cooperate with the United Nations system, in particular its bodies with a mandate related to human rights, such as CSW. So as to better fulfil this obligation, NHRIs have formed the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) and four regional networks – the Network of African NHRIs (NANHRI), the Network of the Americas, the Asia-Pacific Forum of NHRIs (APF) and the European Network of NHRIs (ENNHRI). Since 2009 GANHRI and APF have been jointly working towards an enhancement of independent participation rights for NHRIs at CSW. NHRIs are advocating for participation rights analogous to what they enjoy at the UN Human Rights Council, and now increasingly at the New York based human rights mechanisms such as the UN Open Ended Working Group on Ageing2. This year presents an important opportunity to highlight the role of NHRIs in promoting women and girls’ human rights in rural areas. The case studies in this report provide examples of how NHRIs from all corners of the * This report was drafted for GANHRI and APF by Dr Mirja Trilsch, Professor at the Faculty of Political Science and Law of the Université du Québec à Montréal during a research stay at the German Institute for Human Rights (Jan-Feb 2018), which was funded through a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). GANHRI and APF would like to express their deep gratitude to Dr Trilsch for her work. 1 http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/48/134. 2 http://www.asiapacificforum.net/support/international-regional-advocacy/united-nations/csw/. 1