C-Fam Addresses General Assembly President

By | February 24, 2023

NEW YORK, February 24 (C-Fam) This week C-Fam’s legal expert Stefano Gennarini told a General Assembly gathering that the UN must not allow Western countries to block pro-life and pro-family organizations.

Gennarini explained that powerful groups within the UN system have successfully blocked conservative groups from participating in the non-governmental track of the upcoming Commission on the Status of Women.

His remarks came during a “stakeholder” meeting among UN Members States and non-governmental groups accredited to the United Nations. The meeting was attended by Hungarian Ambassador Csaba Kőrösi, President of the UN General Assembly.

Gennarini thanked “the many delegations who took a stand for life and family” in the General Assembly last Fall. A rump group of countries mostly from the developing world stood up to the EU and the United States and insisted on a controversial vote rather than “go along with a fake consensus.” Votes rarely happen in UN debates. This allows the UN bureaucracy and powerful Western countries to pretend there is unanimity.

In a similar way, non-governmental organizations at the UN attempt to manufacture unanimity by excluding conservative voices. The NGO Committee of the UN Commission on the Status of Women created a list of values, the purpose of which was to block pro-life and pro-family voices.

This year, this surrogate for UN Women, a billion-dollar UN agency, turned down the showing of a documentary on women suggested by the International Youth Coalition (IYc), a program of C-Fam. It turned down other C-Fam event proposals and requests from other pro-life and pro-family organizations in recent years on the grounds that they “don’t align” with their values.

Gennarini said, “As Ambassador Kőrösi and others who have experienced repressive rule under the Soviet Union should appreciate, there is a real danger of totalitarian tendencies, including to silence opponents on pretextual grounds that they are ‘dangerous’, ‘terrorists’, ‘anti-rights.’”

These are charges currently being leveled at C-Fam and other pro-life groups by NGO/CSW and Western backed human rights groups. In a private meeting about these new values, one senior UN leader said that C-Fam was a “terrorist group”, even though C-Fam has Special Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council and has worked at the highest levels of UN negotiations for a quarter of a century.

Gennarini believes such comments and actions “are a form of reprisal for attempts to promote family rights” because many of the groups who are trying to ban C-Fam from the UN are supported by governments, including the European Union.

C-Fam and 600 other groups sent a letter to the Bureau of the Commission on the Status of Women insisting that the NGO process during UN commissions must be open to all voices.

Progressive women have tried for decades to block pro-life voices. Gennarini says they do not have the power to block C-Fam or other groups. “The NGO track is something of sideshow to the real work at the UN, which is negotiating political documents. We work closely with a few dozen brave delegations from the developing world. UN Women can do nothing about that.”

The Commission on the Status of Women, the largest gathering of its kind every year at the UN is set to begin next Month. C-Fam will have a full complement of staff experts attending.

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