President of General Assembly Defends Exclusion of Pro-Life Groups

By C-FAM Staff | 2005

    (NEW YORK – C-FAM) The President of the UN General Assembly has responded to complaints from the US Mission that conservative and pro-life NGOs were excluded from recent consultations with the General Assembly in preparation for the upcoming Millennium Development Summit. In a letter sent to the former acting US Ambassador to the UN, Anne Patterson, and obtained by the Friday Fax, Jean Ping denied that pro-life or conservative organizations were denied entry to the hearings on the basis of their beliefs.

    In the letter, dated July 29, Ping said that "after a thorough review" he had determined that "to my knowledge the selection process of the participants was conducted in a fair and objective manner." He defended the selection process saying there was a "balanced geographical, gender, and sectoral representation of participants as well as a balanced representation of organizations at the local, national and international level . . ."

    William L. Saunders, Jr., a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Human Life and Bioethics at the Family Research Council, said Ping's definition of diversity is, at the very least, narrow. "The liberal definition of diversity holds that as long as there is racial, or ethnic, or geographic, or gender diversity, you have real diversity," Saunders said. "But that is not true. Real diversity is diversity of opinion."

    Participants in the consultation were chosen by a task force led by Ping and consisting of 10 lobbying organizations including the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO). WEDO director June Zeitlan also sent a letter to Ambassador Patterson 10 days prior to Ping's letter containing much of the same language as his letter. "It is a matter of record that no organization was excluded from participating in the hearings because of their point of view," Zeitlin wrote. She said four criteria were established to determine who was admitted including, "Representation of organizations/networks with a broad constituency, of a public interest nature, and operating at the local, national or international level; Gender, geographic and sectoral balance, with attention paid to racial, ethnic, intergenerational and religious diversity; Significant representation from the Global South, indigenous peoples and other under-represented regions or groups."

    One group that applied and was rejected was Red Familia, a coalition of more than 300 pro-family and pro-life organizations from Latin America. With the criteria's special emphasis on organizations from the global south, broad constituency and operations at the local, national and international level, Red Familia would seem to be highly qualified.

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