A/HRC/46/36 peace and security and public decision-making roles, including in peacekeeping operations.17 By contrast, although examples of good practices may exist, little data are available on national intelligence services.18 Improved gender representation can have significant positive effects on the design, delivery and oversight of counter-terrorism law and practice including for women and girls.19 6. The Special Rapporteur reiterates, however, that counter-terrorism institutions and policymakers not only suffer from an acute “diversity crisis” along gender and race lines, especially at the highest levels of decision-making, but also function within institutionalized cultures of discrimination, misogyny and gender bias that perpetuate gender inequality and cultures of impunity, while rewarding a very particular set of traditionally “masculine” traits and behaviours, including technocratic knowledge, justification of the use of force, decisiveness over moral considerations and masculinist protection narratives.20 That creates a complex reality for improving gender parity in those spaces, hindering institutions from responding to crises effectively and serving all communities equally, and leads to instrumentalization of women on the ground and failure to appreciate them as experts in their own right. She acknowledges that having certain women as architects and decision-makers in counter-terrorism and military establishments promoting and regulating counter-terrorism at home and abroad is not unproblematic.21 The addition of women, particularly similarly situated elite women, into such institutions does not necessarily better equip such institutions to mainstream a gender perspective or protect the rights of diverse women. She underscores the complexity of that space and cautions against attention to gender parity alone as a marker of progress on non-discrimination. Regrettably, some women claim to function as feminist voices within those security frameworks instrumentalizing and appropriating a securitized version of the women and peace and security agenda to advance the narrow aims of countering terrorism or securitized countering violent extremism. 22 Necessary transformations are thereby missed, without recognition of the gendered harms and consequences of securitized approaches and their effects on women or the appreciation that the effects of the counter-terrorism State fall on women who are most often of different races, ethnicities and religions from the power brokers making decisions.23 7. From her sustained engagement with women’s civil society actors, the Special Rapporteur is aware that the consequences of increased securitization and expanded counterterrorism and preventing and countering violent extremism regulation have been particularly felt by women-led civil society and by women human rights defenders. She affirms the emphasis placed by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women 24 and the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders on the need to specifically protect women human rights defenders,25 including from the negative effects of ill-conceived and badly applied counter-terrorism law and practice. Recent reports have detailed the increasing threat against women human rights defenders in conflict and postconflict countries, specifically countries experiencing terrorism and those at the centre of France, “Stratégie internationale de la France pour l’égalité entre les femmes et les hommes (2018– 2022)”, sect. 2.3.5. 18 Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance, OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights and UN-Women, “Intelligence and gender, gender and security toolkit” (2020). 19 Ibid. 20 S/2018/900, para. 14. 21 Negar Razavi, “NatSec feminism: women security experts and the US counterterror State”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and International Crisis Group, “A course correction for the women, peace and security agenda” (2020). 22 Ibid. 23 Noting that interventions premised on robust counter-terrorism measures and strategies, including intelligence and special forces, drones and punitive sanctions, are rarely analysed in terms of their effects on women in the sites of use. Ibid. 24 Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, General recommendation No. 30 (2013), paras. 6, 36, 37 and 57 (b). See also statements made by the Committee, including the call made on International Women Human Rights Defenders Day 2020 to release all detained women human rights defenders, including Saudi women’s rights activist Loujain Al-Hathloul. 25 A/HRC/43/51, para. 28. 17 4