C-Fam Protests Feminist Lobby Group AWID After Threats in UN Meeting

By | April 14, 2022

NEW YORK, April 15 (C-Fam) The Center for Family and Human Rights, publisher of the Friday Fax, submitted a formal complaint against an international feminist lobby group after it threatened and attempted to intimidate C-Fam personnel during a United Nations meeting.

A representative of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) called for hunting down and expelling all “anti-rights infiltrators” from the United Nations during a virtual hearing on the participation of civil society in the work of the UN Commission on the Status of Women on February 24. AWID published a report in 2021 labelling C-Fam and other pro-life and pro-family organizations as “anti-rights actors.”

The hearing was hosted by the governments of Denmark and Costa Rica with the assistance of UN Women, all of whom remained silent when the threats were made.

AWID has engaged in name-calling against pro-life and pro-family organizations for over a decade in an effort to shame and discredit their work but until now had never openly called for pro-life and pro-family groups to be thrown out of the UN.

The C-Fam complaint urges UN Women, Denmark and Costa Rica to repudiate the threats and intimidation of AWID and to invite the feminist organization to make amends to C-Fam and any other organizations that might have been threatened.

The complaint also warns the UN delegations of Costa Rica and Denmark that the threats and intimidation create the impression that the threats were sanctioned by UN member states as an act of reprisal against pro-life and pro-family groups with official UN accreditation.

“Silence on the part of UN Women, Denmark, Costa Rica, and NGO/CSW gives AWID’s threats and intimidation the appearance of being an act of reprisal against C-Fam because of our pro-life and pro-family views,” the complaint states.

The complaint explains that many disagreements exist on a range of subjects at the United Nations, and that often members of civil society express themselves with candor and strong emotions. But AWID “crossed a line” according to the complaint.

“Candor and passion, even for a just cause, do not justify threats and intimidation,” C-Fam explains.

C-Fam further alleged that AWID’s threats and intimidation on February 22 were not an isolated incident but part of coordinated pattern of attacks against C-Fam and like-minded pro-life and pro-family organizations.

C-Fam was blocked from participating at the Nairobi Summit in 2019, a conference sponsored by the UN population control agency with the help of the governments of Denmark and Kenya.

More recently, the NGO/CSW committee, a surrogate non-governmental organization of UN Women that facilitates non-governmental organizations’ work on the margins of the annual Commission on the Status of Women, denied the parallel event application of C-Fam and other pro-life and pro-family organizations for this year’s session of the commission. NGO/CSW informed C-Fam that their application was denied because it did not “align with NGO/CSW’s values,” even though C-Fam was granted dozens of parallel events by NGO/CSW starting in the 1990s and as recently as 2019.

When asked about these rejections, Houry Geudelekian, Chairman of the NGO/CSW committee, said that pro-life and pro-family organizations had disrupted previous meetings. Geudelekian was asked for specifics of this charge and did not respond. Pro-life and pro-family groups categorically deny these charges. One pro-life leader told the Friday Fax, “We are always on our best behavior at the UN. We know the feminists run the show.”

AWID is incorporated in the United States as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. According to the last available online records and reports of the organization it had an annual budget of $4 million in 2019, of which 1.3 million were donated by the government of Sweden. The rest of its budget was sourced from the Ford Foundation, the Soros-backed Open Society Foundation, and other large foundations.

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