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India: Debate on GM cotton

Argentina: Trading old bonds for new

Women’s rights: Under attack from neo-conservatives

Banks serve poorest countries best

China: Market economy and dictatorship still co-exist


04/2005		  

[ Women’s rights ]

Under attack from the neo-conservatives

In 1995, the Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing devised an action plan, the most comprehensive and results-driven UN programme to strengthen women’s rights around the world so far. In New York in early March, the United Nations reviewed, in the context of the annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), the extent to which the Beijing Declaration has been implemented. The result was that much has been achieved, but that, nonetheless, the equality of the sexes is still a long way off. The main advances were made in women’s rights and education. The biggest weaknesses are in fighting female poverty and protecting women from violence and becoming victims of trafficking.

Thanks to the USA, however, there was more at stake at the CSW meeting than just how to deal with these problems. Washington made sure that there was a much broader agenda. The US administration insisted on its neo-conservative attitudes and challenged the basic principles of the process which began in 1975 with the First World Conference.

The United Nations has been a strong advocate for women’s rights over the last 30 years. With its four World Conferences on Women, it has endeavoured to place governments under an obligation to introduce measures aiming for equality. Admittedly, the action plans devised by the Conferences are not binding under international law, unlike the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women adopted in 1979 (CEDAW). However, they have a normative effect and are morally binding. Above all, the systematic interpretation of human rights from a women’s perspective (“Women’s rights are human rights”) has strengthened the relevance of women’s rights in many UN documents.

The governments represented at the session in New York were supposed to confirm the Beijing Conference action plan in its entirety. However, the US blocked the meeting for a week by demanding that there be an amendment to the declaration stating that “no new human rights”, as, for instance, a right to abortion, had been recognised by the Beijing Conference. With such unilateral action, the US not only attacked women’s rights but also multilateral principles along with the binding nature of the UN’s concept of human rights. In the end, the US did vote to reaffirm the Declaration but, through its efforts, it has damaged the multilateral approach to law.

The United Nations itself indicated that women’s and gender policies are losing significance in the multilateral context as well. Five years ago, a special general session was convened to review the Beijing process. Now Beijing +10 was much smaller in scale as a CSW session ranks much lower in the UN hierarchy. It was noticeable that the scope for women’s issues is dwindling, as is often the case for Gender Mainstreaming. In the upcoming reform of the UN system, all women’s bodies and programmes (from UNIFEM to the Women’s Rights Commission) are at risk of being made subordinate to other structures or even dissolved.

The UN is endeavouring to extricate itself from its credibility crisis with its focus on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). All other issues are put on the back burner. Accordingly, the women convened in New York were constantly asked to use the Millennium agenda as a reference point instead of the Beijing action plan. However, doing so implies a marginalisation of a rights-based approach fo gender equality which is at best a minor MDG issue. Several thousand women from civil society organisations who had come to New York “to defend” the platform for action with a sense of ownership left the session in great uncertainty as to whether it is possible to further the project to strengthen women’s rights around the world.

Christa Wichterich