June 6, 2000
The issue of violence against women could be a sticking point for negotiators working on a roadmap toward equality between the sexes at a global U.N. conference, says a top U.S. diplomat. "There are some representatives not really willing to look at issues of violence against women and consider them to be human rights issues," said Linda Tarr-Whelan, the U.S. envoy to the U.N. Commission on Women. She did not specify which countries were balking.
"Frankly, the world community is way past that," she said. "More than a dozen countries have criminalized domestic violence since (a 1995 U.N. meeting in) Beijing. Other countries have toughened laws on all kinds of violence against women."
Still, Tarr-Whelan said at a briefing on Monday she was optimistic that representatives from some 180 countries would be able to hammer out a document all could agree on by the end of the five-day conference on Friday. Some 10,000 women have gathered in New York for the conference, which seeks to build on concrete goals for women's equality reached at a pivotal 1995 U.N. meeting in Beijing. A central point of the China meeting was that women's rights are human rights, and that women are entitled to be free from violence in their homes and elsewhere.
In opening the conference, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged immediate action to stop violence against women, promote education for girls and close the "economic divide" between men and women. In 1998 the Women's Environment and Development Organization reported that most governments had drawn up plans based on the Beijing program and that more than 60 had changed laws discriminating against women.
Women's Equality Key to Development
Citing such progress, Annan told the special U.N. General Assembly session most countries have understood that "women's equality is a prerequisite for development". U.S. First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton also spoke out against violence against women, so-called honor killings of women and trafficking in women and girls, saying "Our work is far from done."
The Beijing meeting produced a 12-point Platform for Action that called for improvements for poor women, women in war zones, women and the economy, women's health, women in power and decision-making, institutional ways to help women advance, human rights of women, women and the environment and the treatment of girls.
The New York conference is meant to set concrete targets, including time limits, for putting the goals of Beijing into practice. And more than 1,200 activist groups are on the scene to push for their particular causes. There is also conflict over the question of sexual choice, especially between conservative Islamic states and others, according to Geraldine Fraser-Mileketi, South Africa's minister for public service.
"Should the debate on sexual and reproductive rights not be approached from the point of view of choice, one that looks to protecting rights and providing services to all women and girls?" Fraser-Mileketi told the U.N. conference. "This requires us to have the courage to move beyond the narrow interpretation of sexual and reproductive rights, and even the family for that matter."
Dr. Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings of Ghana, wife of President Jerry Rawlings, stressed women's empowerment as a key to "liberating society from many of its self-inflected miseries." Wu Yi, head of the Chinese delegation and a senior cabinet minister, said that in the 21st century, "Predictably the realization of gender equality will be unstoppable and the cause of women's development will achieve greater progress."
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