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Backlash at the UN

The 56th Commission on the Status of Women was closed without agreed conclusions after an extra week of negotiating. The stumbling blocks were gender equality and reproductive rights.

The subject of this 56th session of CSW was the empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges. What you expect then are agreed conclusions about access - infrastructure, schools, hospitals, seeds and plants, land rights, etc…
There is a lot more that rural women need. But primarily what they need is good health to perform all their tasks, including being able to decide about the number and spacing of their children, and protection against harmful practices like early marriage, and other violence performed by men who have prejudices about women’s worth and capacities. That’s what gender means: social and cultural constructs about the role of women and men, often based on prejudice.
It was so simple, and the first draft of the agreed conclusions said just that.
But then the five pages of draft agreed conclusions became twenty four, some countries wanting to add something and some to strike something. The disagreement was – I was able to read afterwards in the statement of the Norwegian delegate - about ‘moral hazards’. You wonder what moral hazards there can be in ‘access’ as described above. The moral values that have been invoked deprive women of their human rights as laid down in CEDAW (the Convention to Eradicate all Discrimination Against Women)? And for what? Religious freedom and cultural practices. What religion would think it wrong if men and women, boys and girls are taught to respect one another? Absence of this simple lesson is life threatening!

Women’s rights are human rights. Human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated.
The IAW affirms that full and equal enjoyment of human rights - as laid down in treaties, conventions and declarations - is due to all women and girls.
The IAW maintains that a prerequisite to securing these rights is the universal ratification and implementation without reservation of CEDAW. The importance and value of women’s contribution as equal partners has been acknowledged at the numerous United Nations world conferences held from 1975 through to the present time. Of particular relevance for women is the implementation of the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, as reconfirmed in 2000, 2005, and 2010, to which 189 member states have committed themselves. The IAW is committed to uphold these documents! 

The IAW calls on the member states to do the same.

Lyda Verstegen