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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 June 2000 Issue No. 486 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 June 2000 Issue No. 486
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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With the end of the week-long UN women's conference in New York, Dahlia Hammouda reviews the final status of the so-called Beijing+5
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Close to 10,000 delegates and activists from more than 180 governments huddled in conference halls at the UN headquarters in New York last week trying to turn the promises made at the 1995 Beijing women's conference into a concrete plan of action. Mrs Suzanne Mubarak, head of Egypt's National Women's Conference, headed the official Egyptian delegation to the conference.
Despite fears that delegates would stonewall the Beijing platform, the Beijing+5: Women 2000 conference ended Saturday with no backtracking -- but precious few steps forward. The final document issued calls for tougher measures to combat domestic violence and sex trafficking and to tackle the impact of the world's globalisation forces and growing health crises, like AIDS, on women. But despite an all-night session on the conference's last day, virtually no progress was made on the most contentious issues, including access to safe abortion, sexual rights, sexual orientation and equal rights of inheritance.
Midway through the process, long-time tensions between Western delegations and conservatives, led by the Vatican and supported by Catholic and Muslim nations, threatened to reopen battles over abortion and family relationships. Mrs Mubarak had warned in a press interview last week that such battles risked provoking a backlash that would hinder progress. "We don't need to be pulled into all these controversies," Mrs Mubarak said. "We have too many problems as it is. This makes people who are not extremists become ones."
Mrs Mubarak expressed her dismay over some countries' regression on issues discussed exhaustively in Cairo's 1994 population conference and Beijing's 1995 women's conference. Mrs Mubarak delivered a statement to the special UN session, affirming from the outset that there must be no going back on existing Beijing commitments. She also stressed the necessity for respecting cultural differences in dealing with the ideological divide that plagued progress toward agreement on a final document.
Most importantly, Mrs Mubarak proposed the establishment of a Global Facility for Women -- a facility that would act as an umbrella organisation for existing institutions and pool global resources to support programmes and funds charged with formulating strategies for the advancement of women.
Alongside the conference Mrs Mubarak met with a number of leading figures, including fellow heads of delegations and some spouses of heads of state. Mrs Mubarak met with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who said he closely follows Mrs Mubarak's numerous social activities with great admiration, especially her efforts to promote women's equality, childcare and social development. Discussions between the two focused on the report presented by Egypt to the UN on the country's achievements in the field of women's advancement.
Mrs Mubarak also met with US First Lady Hillary Clinton, along with Richard Holbrooke, the US permanent representative to the UN, to discuss measures that would ensure the success of the conference. Mrs Mubarak later met with Carol Bellamy, head of UNICEF, who hailed Egypt's achievements in childcare, saying she was happy with Egypt's efforts in preparing for UN's special session following up on the results of the 1990 Child Summit, due to be held in New York next year.
At the invitation of the United Nation's American Society, Mrs Mubarak delivered a lecture at the University Club premises in Manhattan entitled "Women, partnership and social development." She talked about Egypt's experiences with partnerships between the government and the private sector, non-governmental organisations and specialised UN agencies. The meeting gathered a large crowd of leading figures from the US private sector and donor institutions concerned with development and partnership in developing countries. Mrs Mubarak lauded the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) prominent role in assisting Egypt's National Women's Council to formulate a national strategy to confront the challenges facing women.
Egypt has been viewed as a pivotal country in rallying support for women's rights issues since the 1994 international conference on population in Cairo. The Cairo conference put individual women -- not governments -- at the centre of family planning and demanded that they be given the tools to determine their own reproductive lives. Since the Cairo and Beijing conferences, Egypt has outlawed female genital mutilation, revised its personal status code to make it easier for a woman to obtain a divorce, and set up a national council to advance womens' status.
photo: photo: Mohamed Abdel-Fattah
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