Lauber, Sabina --- "Status of Women: Beijing plus five or Beijing minus five?" [2000] AltLawJl 72; (2000) 25(4) Alternative Law Journal 195

• Status of women: Beijing Plus Five or Beijing Minus Five?
• SABINA LAUBER attended a Special Session of the UN General Assembly to review the outcome of the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women.

Status of women: Beijing Plus Five or Beijing Minus Five?

SABINA LAUBER^[*] attended a Special Session of the UN General Assembly to review the outcome of the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women.

From 5 to 9 June 2000, government delegations and non- government representatives from across the globe gathered for the General Assembly Special Session in New York to review the outcome of the 4th world conference on women, held in Beijing in September 1995.

Known as ‘Beijing Plus Five’, many attendants questioned whether the outcomes of the Special Session warranted a more apt name of ‘Beijing Minus Five’.

The aim of the gathering was to allow governments to present national reports on progress and obstacles in advancing the status of women during the five years since the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action. Simultaneously, a new ‘outcomes’ document of commitments was negotiated by government delegations for adoption by the General Assembly. The document was negotiated by all governments and observer states, and required the full consensus of all parties before it could be finalised.

The Australian government was headed by Senator Jocelyn Newman as the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on the Status of Women and Penny Wensley, the Australian Ambassador to the United Nations in New York as the deputy head. Other government delegates included the new head of the Office of the Status of Women, Ms Rosemary Calder.

However, the Australian government delegation also included a range of non-government members that created a successful mix of diverse views and expertise. Susan Halliday, the Sex Discrimination Commissioner and myself accompanied the delegation as independent advisers from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. In addition, representatives from three non-government organisations (NGOs), Soroptimists International, Australian Federation of Business and Professional Women and the YWCA, were on the delegation. The presence of these non-government members ensured that the discussions in the NGO forums successfully flowed into the government delegation. Regular meetings with Australian NGOs not on the delegation also facilitated this information flow.

As an independent adviser to the Australian government delegation, my own impressions of the gathering were mixed. There is no doubt that processes were chaotic, under-resourced and poorly planned. Negotiations on the final outcomes document went well into the early hours of the morning, every day. On the last day, negotiations went until 5 am. A weary but colourful tribe of delegates poured out of the UN building as the sun rose and clambered into bed for a few hours of sleep before a specially convened General Assembly adopted the document.

The final outcomes document that was adopted was unfortunately a watered down version of the more ambitious document that had been collated at the Preparatory Committee negotiations in March 2000. Open collaboration between the Vatican, which had full negotiation rights, and the more fundamentalist countries such as Algeria, Pakistan and Egypt, brought a strong barrier to the inclusion of key issues for women in the document. References to the decriminalisation of homosexuality were lost, as were references to safe abortion, access to education for women and girls and a strengthened role of NGOs in domestic human rights.

The developed countries carried their own agenda. Together they blocked language relating to increased labour standards for women, particularly in relation to casualisation. Any commitment that required monetary spending was prefaced with words ensuring that no real obligation existed.

However, despite these setbacks, the Beijing Plus Five meeting was an important process for reviewing international standards for women, exposing deficiencies and working towards improvements. In a sense, these review processes facilitate a battlefield where governments and non-governmental organisations can come together and fight it out every five years.

As an essentially government-driven and government- focused process, inadequacies in the system should reflect partly on the UN, but largely on governments. A lack of commitment by governments on women’s rights was clearly indicated at the meeting. Small and under-resourced delegations, chronic lateness in starting negotiations and blatant obstructionist tactics, merely demonstrate how little women matter in the world. Governments should not use Beijing Plus Five to generate another catch-cry of desperate UN reform. Instead, they should look inward, red-faced and disappointed, at a misused opportunity to advance the rights of women around the world.

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^[*] Sabina Lauber is a lawyer working at the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.