Development Conference Document Ignores the Desires of Nations

By C-FAM Staff | 2011

NEW YORK, April 20 (C-FAM) Delegates hurried into the large UN conference room just before three o’clock last Friday afternoon. They had debated every night all week and until past two that morning without agreement. Now they had just twenty minutes to decide whether to accept not their own version of the document but one put together instead by the facilitator of the meeting. 

Some looked visibly upset as they flipped through the pages and rushed to confer with other delegates. Many controversial phrases which governments had objected to remained in the document.  For instance, though a clear majority of the negotiating countries spoke out all week against “reproductive rights,” it still appeared on the first page of the “facilitator’s text”. 

For the third year in a row, the UN Commission on Population and Development had to resort to such last minute procedural maneuvering in order to avoid ending without an agreed outcome document. 

One delegate involved in the negotiations told the Friday Fax that the steadily increasing division in the commission suggests “a weakening of the supposed consensus that forged the original Cairo Program of Action in 1994.”

Twenty three countries opposed “sexuality education” for children as young as ten years old which was proposed by the U.S. while only two other countries supported it. Yet there were five references to it or to “sex education” throughout the document. 

Twenty two Arab states, joined by Malta, Poland, the Holy See and various other nations objected time and again to “reproductive health services,” a term often used by UN staff to include abortion, but it was included nonetheless.  

What explained the disconnect was the fact that the compromise text was not agreed language, but rather it was written by the facilitator of the negotiation, a delegate from Western Europe. 

By the time delegates saw the text late on Friday, they had few options left. They could reject it and go back to their capitals empty handed, facing professional humiliation. Or they could re-enter negotiations in a smaller room upstairs to eke out what face-saving language they could salvage by the end of the day.  They chose the latter option. 

The facilitator told the weary delegates that only two issues were on the table. Pressed to reveal what they were, he announced that they concerned whether to include a clause on national sovereignty, called for by the Arab group, Iran, and Pakistan, and whether to remove reference to “foreign occupation,” a term abhorrent to the United States and Israel. 

The negotiations proceeded in accordance with his instructions despite objections by the Holy See and other delegations that central issues of human life and the family must be also addressed. 

Hours later, the delegates emerged and reassembled in the main hall. The clause on national sovereignty was inserted. None of the references egregious to the majority of nations regarding human life and the family were removed. 

A U.S. Congressional staff member told the Friday Fax “The U.S. will now use this so-called ‘consensus’ document to pressure developing nations to change their laws, saying ‘this is what your country agreed to, now get into compliance or risk losing aid.’”

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