No CSW Agreed Conclusions on Women's Human Rights and Elimination of All Forms of Violence Against Women and Girls

Center for Women's Global Leadership

This year, the CSW did adopt the agreed conclusions on women's access to the media and information and communication technologies and resolutions concerning Afghanistan, Palestine, and HIV/AIDS.¹ For the agreed conclusions and resolutions visit http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/47sess.htm Yet, when the CSW ended on March 14th, consensus had not be reached on the agreed conclusions on women's human rights and elimination of all forms of violence against women and girls. The Commission met in a resumed session on March 23rd and the Bureau shared that the CSW was unable to reach consensus on the agreed conclusions on human rights and violence against women.² For the agreed conclusions on violence against women and human rights that were not agreed to visit http://www.cwgl.rutgers.edu/Global_Center_Pages/csw03/index.html

The Political Context - The War in Iraq
This session was held at the same time in the same building as the Security Council negotiations only days before the start of the war in Iraq. At that time, it had become clear that if the Security Council did not endorse a war in Iraq, the United States and United Kingdom were prepared to start a unilateral war which they did. It was impossible for NGOs and government delegates at the CSW not to be affected by the pending war in Iraq and by the breakdown there of efforts to reach agreements and make compromises.

By the time of the resumed session, March 23rd, the war in Iraq had begun, the United States and the United Kingdom had attacked Iraq without the support of the Security Council and in this climate there was no mood for reaching agreements. After the war began, the United States and the United Kingdom said that they did not want their unilateral actions to set a precedent in international law. Similarly, in the resumed session of the CSW, governments said that they hoped that the inability of this CSW to come to consensus would not set a precedent for future Commissions.

The Broader Political Context
The negotiations at this Commission also surfaced the on-going breakdown at the UN of preceding international alliances and consensus building negotiations. In part, the consensus methodology has worked because governments have negotiated within and between regional voting blocs. At this CSW, the only voting blocs were the EU and the Rio Group (19 Latin American and Caribbean countries), neither the G77 nor the JUSCANZ (Japan, United States, Canada and New Zealand) spoke as a group. In the past, governments met in their regional blocs, negotiated and reached consensus and the bloc representative brought that consensus to the larger discussion. This methodology has allowed for typically 5 or so representatives negotiating in the larger discussions. This year approximately 35 different government delegations spoke, though some spoke more frequently than others, making it difficult to reach consensus.

Beijing + 10 Discussions
It is ironic that while the CSW was failing to reach a consensus on violence against women and human rights, some NGOs at the CSW were discussing the question of the ten-year review of implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the fifth world conference on women. In part because of the political climate and recent negotiations at the CSW and other venues, NGOs felt that any review of the Beijing Platform for Action in 2005 should concentrate on reports on implementation and that there should be no negotiated text. For a more detailed summary of NGO discussions about a Fifth World Conference on Women and the 2005 CSW Review of the Beijing Platform for Action visit
http://www.cwgl.rutgers.edu/globalcenter/csw03/index.html.

Fundamentalists Coalescing and Contentious Issues
In the final stages of the negotiations, much attention was paid to Iran's refusal to accept a proposed paragraph on religion which read as follows: "Condemn violence against women and refrain from invoking any custom, tradition or religious consideration to avoid their obligations with respect to its elimination as set out in the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women." Iran wanted to add "and refrain from invoking freedom of expression to justify such manifestations of violence against women as pornography, and democracy to justify prostitution." The original paragraph, without Iran's suggested addition, is a paragraph from the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence Against Women and was therefore already "agreed language". The facilitator suggested that if governments could not agree on new issues, that they should at least be able to consent to previously agreed language. Ultimately, this strategy was futile.

In the post CSW discussions, this paragraph has been the one that receives most attention. While, it was clear that Iran was unwilling to compromise, they were not the only government resisting consensus. Sudan was committed to undermining any attempt to call for the recognition of women's rights to have control over their sexuality and sexual and reproductive health. There were a few issues that were still being held hostage in the final hour of the negotiations, namely: the correlation between violence against women and HIV/AIDS; use of religion to justify violence against women; the recognition of women's right to control over their sexuality and access to sexual and reproductive health free of coercion; and ending impunity for violence against women in situations of armed and post-conflict situations. The governments unwilling to agree to several of these paragraphs, none of which contained new language, were most notably Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Sudan and the United States. These governments employed the strategy that if consensus could not be reached, then paragraphs that remained should be deleted.

Other controversial issues at the CSW were human rights, the right to development, and the renewal of the mandate of the Special Rapportuer on Violence Against Women.

Human Rights
There were many attempts to weaken the human rights language even though the conclusions were on women's human rights and violence against women. One strategy, lead primarily by the United States was to weaken or delete any references to international instruments such as CEDAW and the ICC. Other attempts to weaken the references to human rights language included qualifiers such as "as appropriate" and "internationally recognized" in many of the paragraphs on human rights. Canada, the EU, South Africa, the Rio Group, and New Zealand worked arduously to ensure the retention of strong human rights language. This effort to weaken how violence is linked to human rights was also visible in Geneva at the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), which did pass a violence against women resolution but not without contentions.³ For the CHR resolution visit http://www.unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf/(Symbol)/E.CN.4.RES.2003.45.En?Opendocument

The Right to Development
While the G77 did not speak as a bloc, the majority of delegations from the Global South called for the recognition of the right to development in the introductory chapeau paragraph. The EU, Canada and the United States, called for the deletion of this reference and defended their position by stating that no one right should be highlighted. This is not a new struggle and has surfaced at many UN meetings.

The UN Special Rapportuer on Violence Against Women
The Canadian delegation introduced an opening paragraph, in the agreed conclusions that welcomed the work of the UN Special Rapportuer on Violence Against Women and an operative paragraph calling on the Commission on Human Rights to renew the mandate of the UN Special Rapportuer on Violence Against Women, its causes and consequences. Egypt, Pakistan, Cuba and the Rio Group did not want to welcome the work of the Special Rapportuer on Violence Against Women. Despite the call in the Beijing Platform for Action for the renewal of the mandate of the Special Rapportuer on Violence Against Women, Egypt along with Syria, Cuba and Senegal, said that it was not the work of the CSW to urge the CHR to renew the mandate.

Agreed Conclusions and Future CSWs
This year's CSW highlighted the increasing difficulties at achieving consensus in the international arena. After it was agreed that no document would be adopted, New Zealand (on behalf of Canada, Australia, Norway and Switzerland) made a really strong closing statement about future sessions of the CSW. Since the Beijing World Conference on Women, many governments have established national machineries to advance the rights of women, and governments often send high-ranking officials from these national machineries to the CSW. New Zealand suggested that the CSW should think about how to best use the expertise of these officials that come from national machineries to the CSW and that the time of the CSW could be more wisely spent discussing best practices, identifying new and emerging issues and strategies for implementation rather than trying to agree on negotiated text based conclusions.

Especially since Beijing +5 in 2000, many women's rights advocates at the CSW have not only been frustrated by the political climate and the lack of political will of many governments but also by the anemic agreed conclusions resulting from consensus procedures. There has been little clarity on the purpose of the agreed conclusions and too little use made of them. The documents produced are often weak and lack mechanisms for reporting on the implementation of the suggested actions. Did governments not come to consensus on violence against women and human rights because they knew that their inaction would have no consequences? As NGOs we need to think about how the CSW can be used more strategically and innovatively to advance the human rights of women.