WUNRN
https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/anne-marie-goetz-joanne-sandler/women%27s-rights-have-no-country
WOMEN’S RIGHTS HAVE NO COUNTRY – LET US BUILD A COHESIVE
PLATFORM FOR WOMEN’S MOVEMENTS WORLDWIDE TO ADDRESS OUR COMMON CHALLENGES &
TO TRY NEW FORMATS – TRANSNATIONAL & MULTIGENERATIONAL FEMINISM
Anne Marie Goetz
and Joanne Sandler
- 5 January 2015
There is no blueprint for holding fast against the
arguments used to dismiss women's humanity, or defending our hard won human
rights. It's time to meet, to brainstorm and try new formats.
At the 2012 Forum
of the Association of Women’s Rights for Development (AWID) in Istanbul, there
were heated discussions about whether to lobby for a Fifth World Conference on
Women in 2015. The majority of older generation feminists taking part expressed
reluctance. A young Turkish feminist took the floor and challenged us,
essentially saying: “It’s fine for those of you who had the chance to go to
Beijing and Nairobi to decline this opportunity. But what about my generation?
We never had the chance to mobilize the way that you did. We need this!”
The 1995 Fourth World
Conference on Women in Beijing – including the official governmental meeting
and its parallel NGO Forum
– is widely hailed as a watershed. We both attended the NGO Forum, held in
Huairou, a town an hour north of Beijing. In a deeply muddy field,
covered in makeshift tents to ward off the insistent rain, with hundreds of
yards of garlands made of discarded plastic water bottles festooning the few
hastily erected buildings in which the concrete had barely dried, 40,000 women
from civil society around the world converged to make history. And they
did. In spite of being accommodated at such a great distance from the
official event, women from NGOs and networks joined their allies on official
delegations to make sure that the final Platform for Action fought off attacks
from the Vatican, from Iran and from a host of others who lobbied to diminish
commitments to women’s equality and freedoms. We left with a sense of purpose
and a roadmap to gender equality: the Beijing Platform
for Action.
1995 Beijing – Women in Black Demonstration: Credit: Anne
Walker
In 2012 the UN briefly debated a
proposal to hold a Fifth World Conference on Women, as a twenty-
year follow up to the 1995 Beijing Conference. It would have been held in 2015, forty years after the UN’s First World
Conference on Women held in Mexico City.
Turkey and Qatar both offered to host. The Secretary
General asked UN member states what they thought - should there be a follow-up to the
Platform for Action agreed at Beijing? It has become
relatively routine to hold these international meetings to review and then
advance achievements in a range of human rights or environmental protection
areas. For instance, the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development was a 20
year follow up on the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.
Many experienced women’s rights advocates breathed a sigh
of relief when UN Member States failed to pass a resolution in favour of
holding a Fifth World Conference and, instead, recommended that 2015 should
focus on (yet) another review of Beijing commitments. Beijing +20 follows other
five-year reviews which have, at best, been lackluster, and could not replace
the galvanizing force and visibility of a UN World Conference. The cautions against
advocating for a new World Conference were made on the following
grounds:
It is far too dangerous now to re-open international
agreements on women’s rights. Powerful governments and non-state actors today
actively obstruct efforts to advance neglected areas of women's rights such as
sexual and reproductive freedoms, and for this reason there was no 20th
anniversary conference this year to advance the agreements made at the Cairo International Conference on Population and
Development. The power of these reactionary forces in an
international forum is considerable; they could seriously reverse progress made
at Beijing.
So many of the commitments in the Beijing Platform have
yet to be implemented - for instance the commitment to increase the proportion
of seats held by women in governments to a minimum of 30%, or to put an end to
female genital mutilation, or to cut military expenditures. An international
conference will be a distraction. Let’s just focus on national and local-level
implementation.
Money! Women’s organizations are starving for
money as it is. An international meeting is expensive and
unnecessary in the age of ‘Skype’ and other electronic meeting venues.
So there will be no Fifth World Conference on Women, at
least not in 2015.
This decision could be exceptionally damaging in terms of
its potential impact on international and domestic women’s movements. But it is
not irreversible. There will be no Conference on Women in 2015. But there can
be one in 2020. Or whenever the women of the world want it to happen. The 20-year
review of the Beijing Platform for Action at the Commission on the Status of Women
(CSW) in New York in March 2015 could generate a recommendation to hold a Fifth
World Conference by 2020. We are making this intervention to join voices with
those who want this topic back on the agenda. As one civil society statement to the upcoming
CSW points out, the UN Secretary General's request for a Fifth World Conference
has not been withdrawn or acted on, so any Member State can put it on the
agenda again.
We agree with those who highlight the real threat of
losing ground on women’s rights. But let us think beyond the usual approach to
these global inter-governmental meetings. The time has come to try a different
format. We do not have a blueprint to hand, but there are options worth
exploring. The Fifth Conference could focus on innovation in implementation,
and could generate pledges for significant national investments in gender
equality. It could focus on the growing frequency and ferocity of
attacks on women human
rights defenders, and on effective strategies and commitments to end
such attacks. The Fifth Conference could focus on a much deeper exchange
between civil society and governments than has ever happened before. Its agenda
and priorities could evolve from a bottom-up, inclusive process that engages
millions of women and men.
There is surely more to gain than to lose in holding a
Fifth World Conference on Women in 2020. At the same time, we need to negotiate
conditions that will help expand, not shrink, the women’s rights agenda:
We are not proposing a re-run of Beijing. We need to re-think
the way that UN world conferences are undertaken anyway. An international
conference does not axiomatically have to arrive at a consensus document. There
is no need to fetishize consensus. Women’s rights cannot be sacrificed to
international agreement if that means lowering standards even further than they
are. It should be possible, through global brainstorming, to come up with an
agenda that builds awareness amongst even the most reactionary governments of
the strength and determination of the global women’s rights constituency, and
that raises the costs - both in the relations between states and in regional
and international institutions - of domestic suppression of women’s rights.
No United Nations Women’s World Conference has yet been
held in the era of social media. In 1995 at Beijing, few had access to email,
let alone the kind of instant commentary and feedback available now. Social
media would expose to domestic and international scrutiny the reactionary
positions of some governments. Democracies would have to think twice before
refusing to support terminations for pregnancies of women raped by soldiers
during conflict, or the rights of same-sex couples to inheritance, or the
rights of adolescents to the kind of education that can prevent HIV infection
and early pregnancy.
Young women and men have not had a chance to engage in
this type of transnational feminism. This would be the chance for a new
generation to take leadership. Younger feminists would have the opportunity to
organize locally and connect globally and contribute to reviving women’s
movements in many countries and regions.
Women from countries under conservative governments need
an opportunity to be heard around the world. If a world conference were to be
held in countries or regions increasingly dominated by fundamentalist religious
interests, it would be an opportunity for women to express their perspectives
about the use of religion or culture to excuse repression and extreme violence.
2020 will mark five years from the time that the new set
of globally-agreed Sustainable
Development Goals come into force. This could be an ideal moment for
a World Women’s Conference, an opportunity for a diversity of women’s voices and
views to assess how the first 5 years are going from our perspective, and
whether progress is happening in ways women feel are most important.
For many, an international women’s conference feels like
an unwarranted extravagance. Yes, these meetings can be expensive; but the cost
of gender inequality is much higher, and the benefits to democracy,
development, and peace of reduced gender inequality, and increasing the
strength of the women’s movement, are massive. These meetings also yield
resources. They provide women’s organizations with opportunities to prove their
relevance and to raise funds. You can’t put a monetary value on international
solidarity. And you can’t deny its importance to women’s mobilization
domestically and internationally.
At the time of Beijing +15, Sunila
Abeysekera, the Sri Lankan women’s human rights champion and peace
leader who died last year, pointed out in an article
on openDemocracy 50.50 that there was no mechanism for joining together “around
the key challenges and demands of women from around the world, irrespective of
their class, race or any other status, to combat the challenges of
discrimination and violence they confront on a daily basis” and she
encouraged that we move “beyond…narrow divisions to build a cohesive
platform for action for women’s movements worldwide to confront and combat the
common challenges…” That is what a world conference on women’s rights
can do that no other venue will allow: update and strengthen a common platform
between women’s movements and networks in different countries and regions that
creates opportunities for partnerships and agreements with, and between,
governments and inter-governmental organizations.
Women’s human rights have no country. There is no
champion state making sure that women’s human rights are advanced. The common
ground that those committed to working for gender equality have is
each other. And a great way to find each other is on the crowded fields -
however muddy - of international meetings and the local, national and regional
preparatory processes that lead to them. We use this ground to marvel at
the arguments used to dismiss our humanity, and then not only hold fast against
these attacks, but keep pushing to make it the ‘new normal’ that yes, women are
human, fully equal, and must live without fear, pain, and prescriptions as to
who they should be and how they should behave.
The starting point for any agreement to hold a Fifth
World Conference on Women must be that there can be no re-opening of past
agreements or looking back to question existing commitments. We all have to
look forward, for there is still so much to be done.