A VIEW FROM UN COMMISSION ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN(CSW) 49
The State of Women’s Rights as International Human Rights Today
 

18/4/2005- The tenth anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women and adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action was commemorated for two weeks last month at the UN in New York during the 49th session of the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. http://www.un.org

Women’s rights are not yet fully realized even in the most developed countries of the world. So, while governments have now convened 49 conferences on the status of women at the UN for over half a century, one must ask if these meetings are successful and whether they make a difference. Like much with international affairs, an honest response can only come in terms that are relative to past efforts and future goals in the effort to secure women’s rights through the application of international human rights.

Merely convening the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in and of itself was an important achievement that was burdened by obstacles. The policy that was adopted there continues to provide strategic political leverage in pressuring governments with their own words and benchmarks to meet, as opposed to stand-alone advocacy by non-governmental organizations and individuals.

Since governments reaffirmed the Beijing documents upon their fifth anniversary in the year 2000, one might have expected that this year’s reaffirmation of Beijing and linkage of the Beijing process to the UN Millennium Development Goals would be uncontroversial.
Yet it took a full week of negotiations with the United States to adopt the declaration without any proposed amendments. With support from the Vatican, the US wanted the Declaration to state that the Beijing Platform creates no new international human rights, specifically no new right to abortion.
http://www.un.org

While this was by no means the only problem encountered this year, it was clearly the most publicized one because it took half of the conference to clear up. The presence of several right wing, anti-choice NGOs from the US and Latin America lent a sense of urgency to the proceedings. Chaos occasionally broke out in the upstairs NGO gallery when participants expressed sounds of condemnation and applause in response to relevant statements being made on the floor below.

Women’s NGOs from the US and worldwide applauded the declaration’s final adoption for which they ardently lobbied.
Even they can’t deny that reiterating the Beijing Platform without actually doing anything to advance it is potentially harmful because it lends the false appearance that governments are doing something when in fact they are not.

Governments themselves expressed disappointment that the pre-negotiated declaration was not adopted pro forma and therefore important negotiations regarding resolutions to be adopted were delayed. The distraction took its toll when at the end of the session they ran out of time to elect new members to the Commission. It was agreed that rather than end the 49th session they would postpone it and meet again later in the year to take care of more business.

Unfortunately, operating with what has become the acceptable insult of being sidelined and treated “like a woman” is not a new dynamic for the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). Initially founded as a subcommission to the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), even gaining full status as an independent commission was a challenge for the CSW. Despite meeting that challenge 59 years ago, the CSW still has no rapporteurs or experts assigned to carry out its mandate whereas 53 special rapporteurs, independent experts, personal representatives, and working group members are assigned to the CHR (of whom only 14 are women).

The structural inequality for women’s issues that is embedded within the CSW and other UN mechanisms is obliquely referenced in the resolution tabled by Bangladesh and the United Kingdom on mainstreaming a gender perspective into national policies and programs. According to the UN’s press release, the adopted resolution asks the CSW to reiterate that “gender mainstreaming is a tool for effective policy-making at all levels and not a substitute for targeted, women-specific policies and programs, equality legislation, national machineries for women’s advancement and the establishment of gender focal points.” It calls on the UN system and relevant organizations to strengthen their efforts and stresses the importance of political will from member states and asks the Secretary-General to report to the CSW 50 on progress in implementing the resolution.


This year’s CSW came at a time when the UN was already under public scrutiny because of a report that the Secretary-General requested UN Ambassador Prince Hussein of Jordan publish on sexual assault by peacekeepers in the Congo and elsewhere.

However institutional gender imbalance at the UN presents a less sexy and more chronic nut to crack particularly because many governments face similar problems at home. The most mundane face of it can be seen in terms of staffing at the UN itself. According to a report by the Secretary-General’s Special Advisor on Gender Issues, women on staff in UN Secretariat professional and higher categories is at 36.4 per cent as of June 2004. As of December 2003, professional and higher-categorized women with appointments for one-year or more stand at 37.4 per cent. When broken down in terms of professional ranking, the percentages more clearly show a pink
ceiling. They show that the majority of posts gained for women are at entry levels whereas percentages of women in the highest professional grade and directorships remain in the teens.


The fact that the gender mainstreaming resolution and the other nine resolutions that were finally adopted at the CSW are still not posted on the UN’s website or anywhere else online after the conference’s conclusion already a month ago merely belabors the point. Nonetheless, many important advancements were made at this year’s CSW that are worth noting. Along with the gender mainstreaming resolution, a resolution on the advisability of appointing a special rapporteur on discrimination against women snuck onto the agenda just in time for the mid-session deadline for tabling resolutions.

With initial co-sponsorship by Rwanda and the Philippines, this resolution calls to create the CSW’s first-ever Special Rapporteur. The Beijing Platform itself is based on the unquestionable principle that women have equal rights as men and that obstacles to overcoming inequality present serious consequences for the well-being of all. This resolution and the appointment of such a rapporteur therefore address a fundamental need.

The resolution calls on the: “Secretary-General to report to the CSW, at its 50th session, on the implications of the creation of a Special Rapporteur, and to include in his report the views, inter alia, of the Member States and relevant UN bodies including the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights.”

Four other new resolutions were adopted at the CSW: reducing demand for trafficking (sponsored by the US); integrating a gender perspective in post-disaster relief especially in response to the Indian Ocean tsunami (sponsored by the Philippines); indigenous women (introduced by Bolivia); and women's economic advancement (which was initiated by the US, but then the US withdrew its sponsorship).

Another four resolutions were carried over from previous CSW sessions were:

• women, the girl-child and HIV/AIDS (sponsored by Mauritius on behalf of the Southern African Development Community);
• the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (tabled by Jamaica on behalf of the Group of 77 and China, as well as by Mexico);
• the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan (tabled by Jamaica on behalf of the Group of 77 and China);