C-Fam Addresses UN High Level Political Forum

By | July 21, 2023

NEW YORK, July 21 (C-Fam) This week, C-Fam’s VP of Legal Studies Stefano Gennarini, formally addressed the High-Level Political Forum at UN headquarters.

The High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development is an annual two-week conference of the United Nations to review progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs. The SDGs are a broad set of 169 social, economic, and environmental policy targets, including targets related to reproductive health that UN agencies use to promote abortion.

The two-week conference is the most important annual UN meeting on international cooperation for development. During the conference, delegates report on their countries’ efforts to implement the SDGs, and UN agencies detail their own efforts. Governments and NGOs also have opportunities to offer their perspectives.

It is a meeting rife with mischief where Western countries attempt to advance controversial social issues.

Gennarini was among a few non-governmental speakers invited to address the Forum.

He told delegates that “the family must be at the heart of international cooperation, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights rightly recognizes, the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society.” He said it is especially vital as the world emerges from the COVID-19 crisis.

Gennarini pointed to “the oil canvas that presides over the Security Council chamber that depicts the world rebuild after World War II related theme of the phoenix, rising from the ashes, superimposed with a vignette that represents the family, a man, a woman, united in marriage, and their children.”

He said, “The family is at the heart of the mural painted by Per Lassen Krohg, in 1952, depicting agriculture, science, industry, progress, and the founding of the United Nations amidst the world in jubilation as it emerges from the darkest conflict and oppression. Evidently, the Norwegian painter read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose 75th anniversary we are celebrating this year.”

Gennarini told delegates to the High-Level Forum, “It is lamentable that so many obstacles stand in the way of making the family a keystone of development policies and programs. Some want to redefine the family. Some call into question the family as an agent of development and a subject of human rights.”

Gennarini refers to an open battle at the United Nations over the family’s nature and definition. The argument pits the powerful Western and Northern countries against countries in the developing world.

Gennarini has argued in a new paper that UN documents show the family has long been understood as a rights-bearing institution and that it is only ever based on men and women. Even so, Western delegates from Europe and North America aggressively argue that the family has no rights per se and has “various forms, ” a phrase meant to promote homosexual/trans couplings. In recent years, delegates have found it nearly impossible to mention “the family” without progressive governments insisting upon the insertion of language about “diverse forms.”

Gennarini has been deeply involved in UN negotiations for more than a decade.

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