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Human Rights Defender |
By Margot Kingston 1
Heading for 2am Friday September 15, sleeping bodies pile up on the main committee room floor. Slow handclapping splutters again, for a few seconds. The world wanders in and out. Waiting, more than anything, for the damn thing to be over so everyone can get the hell out of Beijing, and home.
The world women's conference would end on a mixed note: the two intractable issues had proved to be sexual orientation, and whether to make the whole platform of action subject to cultural values. Sexual orientation was dumped, the other was resolved. Paragraph 97 was the remarkable, wholly unexpected achievement of the conference. Its final inclusion in the document says much about the tactics and alliances in Beijing that defined the issues for the world's women for the next decade.
It had been predicted that reproductive health would be a major battleground of this conference, as the Vatican and Iran tried to roll back progress at last year's Cairo Population Conference, where unsafe abortion had been acknowledged as a health problem.
The European Union threw down the gauntlet with a call for the recognition of "sexual rights' in draft paragraph 97 in the health section of the Platform for Action. In Beijing, each section of the draft Platform was considered in detail by a designated Working Group, with the task of reaching agreement on the disputed text. Paragraph 97 became the first major issue for the health working group.
Debate began early in the conference. Key players such as the Vatican and Iran wanted to be cooperative early so as to establish their bona fides and build up favours that they could trade on later in the conference. Brownie points gained by earlier concessions could make the difference in securing the inclusion or deletion of particular wording on issues that these countries would go to the wall on.
Prospects for success were also aided by the presence of a decisive chair of the health working group, Egypt's Mervat Tallawy, and a woman from Barbados who led the contact group, the sub-committee of the working group that had the task of negotiating agreed text, Barbados led the charge from the Caribbean in strongly backing recognition of sexual rights. The African countries were well organised, and at first strongly in favour of the term sexual rights, spurred on by horrifying levels of HIV/AIDS in their countries, and endemic domestic violence. But they backed away a little after the intervention of a well-organised conservative NGO lobby, which distributed pamphlets, saying that sexual rights included the right to be gay.
The Coalition for the Family was ubiquitous at the conference, claiming recognition of sexual rights would legalise child sex, bestiality and the like, and urging conservative countries to stand by the family at all costs. Group members were vague on who belonged to this coalition but the majority were from right to life groups and fundamentalist evangelical groups from the US. Intervention from these conservative groups was enough to neuter the progressive US delegation, which did not take a stand on major social issues at the conference for fear of a backlash back home.
The Family Coalition took a strong stand on all sections that could be seen to undermine the traditional family, calling for 'the family' to replace references in the text to 'families' or 'families in all their diversity', and arguing for the safeguarding of parental rights when the rights of girl children were debated.
The evangelical conservatives were joined at times by a fundamentalist Moslem coalition in decrying the platform as anti-family and pro-radical-lesbian. Despite their clear ideological and religious differences, Catholics and Moslems were united in opposing radical moves towards the liberation of women from oppressive social structures and customs.
On paragraph 97, Iran and the Vatican were so obsessed with removing any concept of new sexual 'rights' from the platform, they proved amenable to replacement text, with the same substance but without the contentious link of 'sexual' with 'rights'. The agreed text proclaimed that sexual and reproductive choices were human rights. Many now see this as a stronger formulation.
Australian negotiator Margaret Dean said that, after this was agreed in principle in a small contact group consisting of all the key players, it became a matter of "hard, hard work, hard negotiation, a lot of going back to previous documents and `can you live with this' questions."
"Iran and the Holy See were very reasonable, and Iran came up with the final draft". But their associates were unreasonable to the end - Yemen, Sudan, Jordan among the Moslem fundamentalists, and Guatemala, Honduras and Malta for the Catholic fundamentalists.
The result - Paragraph 97'`The human rights of women include their right to decide freely and responsibly on matters relating to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination and violence.'
Dean and another Australian delegate, Tricia Szirom, agree that many countries were not appraised of what "sexuality" encompasses. The use of the term in paragraph 97 would prove the only recognition in the whole platform of the right to choose homosexuality. The flexibility that paragraph 97 gave women to choose contraceptive measures and otherwise control their sexuality and reproduction was also unprecedented. While for Western women the issues of sexual freedom and sexual orientation were probably more significant, the paragraph was equally important for third world women, for whom the control of their sexuality and reproduction can be fundamental to their economic power and indeed to their survival.
Of course Iran, the Vatican, and other countries hardline on sexual matters reserved on the clause, but their willingness to allow it into the document surprised many.
It soon became clear, to both conservative governments and the family fundamentalist NGOS, that countries had agreed to the contact group's compromise without realizing what they were really doing. The rest of the conference was dominated by attempts to claw back the sexual agenda. Parents 'rights' to veto information about sex and contraception to their children quickly became a conference flashpoint, as did renewed attempts to make the health section of the platform subject to contrary cultural or religious beliefs.
The success of paragraph 97 may have made the burying of sexual orientation inevitable. The draft text acknowledged that women suffered discrimination and violence because of their sexual orientation and called on governments to take action to stop such discrimination and violence. Before debate could even begin, the term had to be explained to a number of countries. The issue was only debated publicly, and then very briefly, on the second day of the conference, when several delegates demanded a definition and others wanted the words dropped immediately. From then on, the topic was in closed contact groups, which achieved nothing but conflict, with no hint of any compromise. In the private negotiations, the Vatican claimed that if the Platform was to include references to discrimination against lesbians, it really should also call for an end to discriminaton against smokers.
Australia supported the inclusion of the sexual orientation paragraphs, together with most other Western countries and some African countries. But it appeared that no country was prepared to take the subject up as its own and push hard for its inclusion. By the last night, it was clear that the inclusion of any explicit reference to sexual orientation was doomed, although Canada was still trying to save it to the extent of having it listed as a cause of discrimination. But even such a factual acknowledgment failed in the end. Several delegates I spoke to believed sexual orientation was probably deliberately held back till the last minute to allow it to be traded away in return for the abandonment of a proposal that would have made much of the document subject to 'cultural values'. There is no doubt that Iran and the Vatican saw the dumping of sexual orientation as a great victory - its deletion made the clear statement that the world did not believe lesbians were subject to violence and discrimination because of their sexuality, or that if they were, that this was justified. There were even cheers and applause from Moslem delegates when the verdict on sexual orientation was handed down, Dean said the failure on sexual orientation only emphasised the importance of paragraph 97, and its significance in the Beijing document.
Apart from paragraph 97, the platform did manage to transform pious rhetoric into government pledges for action across the board on women's equality. The document itself is of persuasive use only, though Australia did manage to get broad support for its proposal that each country make specific commitments for action at the conference. But Canada, New Zealand and the European Union combined to block plans for each country's commitments to be recorded as part of the official platform. Those countries hadn't made many commitments in their speeches to the conference, but they claimed embarrassment wasn't their motive, rather fear that a focus only on two or three promises for action would undermine the importance of implementing the whoe platform.
The incident emphasises the fragile nature of NGO autonomy, and the constant threats to their independence posed by government funding. The federal government is in the process of transforming its funding criteria for women's groups - from now on it wants to fund groups with big memberships to let it know what women want. Groups like WEL, there to critique policy and push for change, are on the outer under the new order.
Most Australians I spoke to believed Australia would have nothing to do to comply with the platform of action. They're probably wrong - the platform is long and details plans on everything from stopping poverty to putting more women in power. One delegate told me medical education will be targeted for reform, with the platform pledging government action to ensure all such courses are gender-sensitive. Conferences to analyse the platform, and to lobby for action on it, will begin around thee country soon, to make sure that after all the work, the platform is not bottom drawered.
1. Margot Kingston is a former solicitor and is now a political reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald