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
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International Viewpoint n° 271 — November 1995
ITY NOW
IGUALD.
IGUALDAD YA
EQUALI 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.
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International Viewpoint n° 271 - November 1995
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 *