Bette briefs the Europe/North America NGO Caucus at CSW58

After two weeks of negotiations, the 58th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW58) finally reached agreed conclusions late on Friday 21st March.  In this blog, Bette Levy, one of our UN Reps in New York, reports on the final evening. 

As a Committee Member for the NY NGO Committee on the Status of Women, Bette was an extremely energetic and highly visible presence throughout CSW, running NGO caucus meetings and helping to keep all NGO representatives up to date with developments. 

We came down to the wire with getting an agreed
conclusion. At the NGO briefing on Friday morning Ambassador Cabactulan (of the Philippines, chairing this year’s Session)
voiced his concern. Time was running out and the gap was still wide.  As Friday approached there had still been about
40 paras to get through and 8 hot and what was considered contentious issues. As the day wore on, that number decreased slightly. However, the African Union
was sticking to their demands on family, sexual and reproductive health and
rights, sexual orientation and gender identity, official development assistance resources
and of course sovereignty. The Ministers from Egypt and South Africa broke
away from the group late Thursday night and tried to move a forward thinking
document.

At
around 6:00 pm, Christine Loew, the facilitator from Switzerland, asked for an
extension until 7:30 pm to work out some of the last issues primarily paras 9
(challenges in implementing the MDGs) & 25 (the role of human rights). Then
another extension was asked for until 8:15 pm.  That deadline went by without
any word. Around 8:50 pm we learned that they would not be back until 10:00 pm.
Around that time a significant number of ambassadors left the conference room
to join into the negotiations. We evidently heard that the facilitator was
going to write the text.

As you can imagine there was much frustration in the
room and discontent with the African Union (AU) for holding up progress.  Many members of the NGOs on delegations from
the AU, were beside themselves.  Many
national laws and policies in the countries blocking progress already codified
these rights.  The Holy See tried there
hardest to insert their demands but were reminded they were not a voting member
(Guardian article, March 21).

Around
10:30 pm we heard there was a facilitator’s text but the mood in the room was
clearly less optimistic than it had been 3 hours earlier. We were told that
copies were being made and then we waited & waited.. but somewhere around
11:30 pm we started to see the ambassadors return to the room and it was
interesting to see the mood lift in the room in spite everyone being on edge
and overtired.

At
11:50 pm, copies of the draft agreed conclusion were passed out to all in the
room and the chair asked for a 10 minute suspension of the meeting for people
to have a chance to read the document. There was an extremely loud groan in
unison by all in the room and the chair took the opportunity to move right into
a vote.

The document was accepted by all. We had a compromised agreed
conclusion that has many progressive paras but didn’t go quite far enough for
some. The chair began to take statements from the floor. 25 member states asked
to speak.

The
AU spoke first and stated while they were in favor of equality and rights for
women they objected to some of the language and wanted to voice their
reservations regarding family, sexuality education for children, that the paras
on official development assistance (ODA) were not strong enough and they reserved on the paragraph on sexuality
education They were not applauded for their statement.

The
next few speakers from Mexico, Egypt, EU, were disappointed in the process of
the negotiations and that stronger language was not in the document. There was
many in favor of family being more inclusive and at the very least to use the
family as it is defined in the Beijing Platform for Action (the outcome of the fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, 1995, which set out an agenda for women’s empowerment)

.

The minister from Egypt was hardly able to
give her statement because she received so much support and applause for what
she was saying. She received a standing ovation from the NGO community when she
finished. Some of her key points were: her concern regarding the future agenda
for women and her fear that we face many challenges; her belief that there needs to be better coordination or we might not find that the post
2015 agenda is good for women. She reiterated that we should not and will not
accept anything less than what has been agreed upon at International Conference on Population and Development/Beijing Review
Conferences. And we cannot give in to the continuing conservatism against
women.

We
heard from many countries their reservations primarily around sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR)/Sexuality
Education, family and national laws (cultural and religious laws).   

El
Salvador took the floor and once again the room erupted in cheers.. their representative stated that
stagnation is not an option! He went on to say that sexuality is NOT only
between your legs but is also between your ears and in your heart… that’s why
they believe sexuality education for all is important.

Argentina, Australia,
Brazil & the US regretted that sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) was left out. When the minister from
South Africa took the floor and stated SA was in full support of the document,
including the paragraph on sexuality education, again breaking from the AU’s
statement.

The
Chair was very accommodating allowing anyone who wanted to speak to speak.
There were many praises for the work done by Christine Loew and Ambassador
Seger. At approximately 1:05 am the discussion was over at which time they were
going to take up the resolution on HIV/Aids which was quite progressive in the
draft we were handed in the late evening, but I did not stay for those
discussions.

News article about the final agreement: "Milestone" agreement at Commission on the Status of Women..but much more work to be done

Read more Soroptimist updates from CSW58. Full analysis the agreed conclusions will be available there soon.