The fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing from September 4-15 adopted a "satisfactory" action programme. It does not reverse past gains, as it seemed for a while. It consolidates the results of previous United Nations conferences. But the holy alliance of fundamentalists of all faiths is still with us...
International Viewpoint n° 271 - November 1995 19
THE
UN's
BIGGEST conference ever confirmed the Vienna (1993) declaration that "the rights of women and girls are an inalienable, integral and inseparable part of the universal rights of each human being"
• It also reconfirmed the advances made concerning reproductive rights at the Cairo (1994)
conference on population:
"these rights are based on the recognition of the fundamental right of all couples and individuals to decide freely.... the number of children and the space between their birth, and to dispose of the necessary information to exercise this right, as well as the right to the best state of health in matters of sexuality and reproduction...
without becoming victims of discrimination, coercion or violence..."
As we would have expected, the most difficult sections of the declaration to negotiate were those concerning reproductive rights, human rights and the rights of girls.
The struggle around women's free choice in matters of procreation, the most sensitive point, centred on paragraph 97 of the section on health.
The Vatican was faced by a number of state delegations which were determined not to revise advances in women's rights made in previous conference declarations.
Mgr Peter Elliot tried to present the
Catholic church's position as equidistant between the Islamic delegations of Iran and Sudan, and the European Union. "We don't suggest going back on the previous texts of the United Nations, nor on the by Sophie Massouri commitments made in Cairo. But we don't want to go any further either."
The final version of paragraph 97 affirms "the human rights of women include their right to control and decide, in freedom and responsibility, in the domain of their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of all coercion, discrimination and violence".
Women's rights in matters of sexuality beyond procreation itself are recognised for the first time. However, the Iranian delegate who affirmed that this paragraph be understood as applicable only within legal marriage, and for questions of sexuality linked to health, was supported by Japan, Jordan, Sudan, Yemen, Lebanon, Argentina and the Vatican.
Once paragraph 97 was approved, opponents tried to minimise its importance by adding references to the sovereignty of each state, and respect for
"religious beliefs, moral values and traditions" to paragraph 9, in the first part of the text, which deals with the general question of equality between men and women.
While the final wording recognises state in the sovereignty interpretation of the declaration, it states nevertheless that policies, even in the name of religion, should not be in contradiction with universal human rights, as defined by the Universal
Declaration of Human
Rights of 1945 and the UN
Conference on Human
Rights in Vienna in 1993.
Paragraph 107 (k)
advises countries to revise penalties for women who have illegal abortion, while stressing that "abortion should in no case be propagated as a method of family planning."
Opposition to these two paragraphs did not just come from countries with religious regimes. Rights over sexuality are at the heart of the debate on women's emancipation. They are questions of state control, and male control, over women's bodies. Both the paragraphs in question also condemn forced sterilisation and controls on maximum family size, as practised in China itself.
WHAT MADE THESE ADVANCES POSSIBLE?
NGO pressure on their respective governments before this conference had been generally ignored. But Beijing revealed the existence of a structured women's movement. This movement is
20 International Viewpoint n° 271 — November 1995 not quite the same as 10 or 20 years ago. And many governments cannot afford to ignore it. The NGO forum at Huairu, near Beijing, had 25,000 participants, from all over the world, despite all the police and political pressure women's organisations face round the world.
In Nairobi, women came to denounce the World Conference. The watchwords of the Beijing NGO forum were network, caucus and lobby. Preoccupations which testify to a process of integration.
Whether we like it or not, a number of NGOs are powerful enough internationally to be real players in negotiations like the Beijing conference. USbased groups are the strongest, but the forum also testified to the strength of very political and highly organised NGOs from Latin America and South-East Asia. The regrettable absence of any significant European women's movement cannot be explained by the oft-mentioned "material difficulties" THE NGO FORUM WAS A SUCCESS. There were 3,000 workshops, and thousands of women testifying their determination to defend our gains, and wanting to go further. All this certainly had an effect on the official conference.
The European Union declaration that it is "the duty of each state" to apply and respect the "economic, social.. cultural... civic and political rights" of men and women had a real influence on the conference. The Vatican went as far as to accuse Cristina Alberdi Alonso, Spanish Social Affairs Minister and head of the EU delegation, of "preventing a consensus" on sexuality and the family. Alberdi argued, on the basis of a document approved by the EU Council of Ministers on 11 July 1995, for the recognition by the UN of non-married heterosexual couples and homosexuals. She also argued, without success, for the inclusion of the term "sexual orientation" in paragraphs 48 and 226 of the Beijing document. SEXUALITY WAS THE LAST DEBATe of the conference, and the first time the UN had debated the subject at this level. "Sexual orientation" was eventually deleted from the document. But as a representative of one lesbian group noted, this was only a semi-defeat. "In 1993, only two countries made public statements in favour of the integration of "sexual orientation" into the final text. In Beijing, there was a long debate. And the delegations of the European Union, United States, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Lithuania, Israel, Cuba, Norway and Jamaica all defended the term "sexual orientation". In an earlier debate, rape in wartime was recognised as a "crime against humanity"
The 181 states present have engaged themselves to take the necessary measures to implement the final Beijing Declaration, and to ratify without condition a number of existing international conventions, including the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
Of course, the non-binding character of most international texts means that implementation is up to the good will of the individual states. "We will get what we fight for", said Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. Women have perhaps won one battle in Beijing, not the war itself. The real changes will be the ones women impose through the struggles to come. Note All citations from UN conference documents are our own translation from the French version.
NGOs and the UN
ALMosT 2,000 Non-Governmental Organisations had accreditation to "participate" in the Beijing conference of country delegations. NGO participation is now an integral part of the UN conference ritual. Is this just a mechanism for increasing the legitimacy of the conference, or something more?
Few NGOs were present during the first World Conference on Women in Mexico in 1975. They were rather more visible in Copenhagen in 1980. They were still not invited to observe the "real" debate. But thousands of women descended on Copenhagen University, creating a real counter-summit.
About 14,000 women from 150 countries were present at the NGO conference which accompanied the Nairobi conference of 1985. This was a noticeably less anarchic event than in Copenhagen. The NGO forums are now prepared by a committee -designated by the UN -which effectively controls the NGO activities organised during the conferences. Individual NGOs can suggest forum topics, but it is the New Yorkbased NGO organising committee which approves or rejects. In Beijing there was also a Chinese organising committee, which tried to control political activity. It used all kinds of pressures to prevent, for example, commissions on the situation in Tibet.
UN General Secretary Butros Butros-Ghali first recommended to governments that they integrate NGOs in the process of preparation of UN world conferences back in 1991. As a result, the Copenhagen, Rio de Janeiro (environment), Vienna (human rights), and Cairo (population) conferences have seen not just an NGO forum, but the participation of NGOs in the governmental conference. A number of NGOs are integrated into certain governmental delegations. But it is impossible to say how far their voice has a weight in the negotiations. Some do no more than make the occasional suggestion.
Who and what do all these NGOs really represent? Accreditation was delivered by an ad hoc committee of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. In general, only those NGOs which are perfectly integrated into their country's institutions received a favourable response. Those who somehow bother the governmental delegations were filtered out at this stage. The Vatican (which, for the UN, has the status of a state tried, in vain, to prevent the accreditation of all those Catholic organisations (like Catholics for A Free Choice, which has groups in many Latin American countries) which do not share its point of view. China itself refused to accept the presence of Tibetan and Taiwanese women *
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EQUALITY NOW IGUALDAD YA