LONDON (AlertNet) - After years of foot-dragging, the U.N. General Assembly has finally approved a resolution to create a high-level agency for women's rights, which supporters have hailed as a historic breakthrough.

The decision this week to merge four U.N. bodies dealing with women's issues to form a single agency with greater clout comes after three years of political wrangling -- and decades after the world body created similar agencies to deal with children, refugees, environment and development.

While the move has been welcomed globally, some women's rights activists say they are frustrated it has taken so long but hope it will bring progress in many critical areas such as HIV/AIDS, sexual violence, political representation, economic and environmental development and human trafficking.

"It is absolutely vital in this world and it should have happened sooner," said Stephen Lewis, co-director of the AIDS-Free World advocacy group.

"It's absolutely huge because the abysmal neglect within the multilateralism within the U.N. of women's issues over the years had to be corrected."

The outcome of the Sept 14 vote was mired in doubt mainly because of what critics said was horse-trading from Egypt, Sudan, Iran and Cuba who were holding out for concessions on other issues before agreeing to approve the new agency.

Even after the vote, critics complained that the resolution was watered down at the last minute deleting any reference to the new body's future mandate.

"We are really outraged at these countries that are holding this women's agency hostage to get what they want from other areas of U.N. reform. What they are doing is political game playing, while more women die," said Kathy Peach, policy and advocacy manager at the Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) policy before the resolution was passed.

SEXISM?

Although many outside the system would think of the United Nations as a bastion of political correctness, Lewis said it is rife with sexism -- the main reason why it has taken so long to create an agency to protect the rights of 52 percent of the world population.

"The sexism in the U.N. has been indelible from the moment it was created," Lewis said in a telephone interview from Toronto.

"You've never had an equal number of women in high positions. You've never had public policies in the developing world in particular but in the world in general which upheld the rights of women ... It's really a manifestation of a terrible failure over the decades."

Critics point out that the existing offices for women -- the best known being the U.N. Development Fund for Women, or UNIFEM, a subsidiary of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) -- are not as powerful or well-funded as other fully-fledged U.N. agencies.

For example, the United Nations children's fund UNICEF has a staff of 10,500 and an annual budget of $3 billion compared with the current U.N. women's organisations which, combined, have a total of 300 staff and a budget of $220 million.

"That just gives a flavour of how completely de-prioritised and under resourced women's issues have historically been within the U.N. system," Peach said.

"This is really an opportunity to address some of that by consolidating all those existing entities into a proper fully fledged agency that would have resources, authority and a mandate to really start improving women's lives on a significant scale."

Advocates hope this new super-agency will consolidate and strengthen the work of the smaller U.N.'s women agencies, appoint an Under-Secretary General with the same powers as the heads of other major agencies in the U.N. system, receive sufficient funding starting at $1 billion and acquire operational capacity on the ground in every developing country.

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