Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (centre) arrives with Babatunde Osotimehin (left), Executive Director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), for the opening of the 46th session of the Commission on Population and Development, Apr. 22-26, 2013. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 2014 (IPS)

When the United Nations hosts one of its mega conferences – whether on population, human rights, food security or sustainable development – there is always a demand for full and active participation of often-marginalised groups, including women, civil society, indigenous peoples and youth.

But some of the world’s parliamentarians – who help implement most of the U.N.’s programmes of action through national legislation – are also battling to find their rightful place at international conferences.

This is not a shortcoming of the United Nations, say legislators, but the fault of governments that refuse to acknowledge the importance of parliamentarians in official delegations.

When the annual U.N. Commission on Population and Development (CPD) takes place in New York next month, the Asian Forum of Parliamentarians on Population and Development (AFPPD) wants all governments in the Asia-Pacific region to include “at least one parliamentarian committed to progressive population and development policy in their country’s official delegation.”

John Hyde, deputy director of AFPPD, told IPS parliamentarians are directly elected and connected to their communities.

“They can see first-hand the benefit of rights-based, evidence-based policies in improving the life of their constituents,” he said.

And they bring this relevance and commitment to their nations’ delegations, he said.

The Programme of Action (PoA) adopted at the landmark 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) – which will be discussed at the CPD Apr. 7-11 – stressed the importance of parliamentarians, civil society and youth being involved in official delegations to the United Nations.

Confirming this, Purnima Mane, president and chief executive officer of Pathfinder International, told IPS “it is incredibly important we involve parliamentarians in development work, empowering them to appreciate and raise issues of population and development with their constituents, and gaining their support to champion global development in national policies, programmes, and budgets.”

In many countries, she pointed out, parliamentarians are already engaged in the process of monitoring their national progress on the ICPD PoA, and building political will and an enabling policy environment, and garnering needed resources for doing so.

Their example needs to be followed more vigorously around the world and inclusion of parliamentarians in national delegations is one way of recognising their role, said Mane, a former U.N. assistant secretary-general and deputy executive director of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA).

Hyde told IPS over a third of the Asia-Pacific nations included members of parliaments (MPs) in their delegations to the sixth Asia and Pacific Population Conference held in the Thai capital of Bangkok last year.

The Pacific nations demonstrated the value of well-prepared, engaged MPs, with Cook Islands delegate leader, health minister and AFPPD member Nandi Glassie presenting the majority outcome position on behalf of all the Pacific and a solid majority of Asian nations.

Source: ICPD Beyond 2014 Global Report

While many nations will not reveal their full delegation until just before April, many parliamentarians who contributed to APPC should be in their nations’ delegations at the CPD in New York, “hopefully with other parliamentarians embedded in delegations from the other regions of the world”, he added.

Hyde said parliamentarians from across Asia and the Pacific gathered in Chiang Mai, Thailand last month to help craft the official oral statement on priority issues that AFPPD will present during the CPD in New York.

Asked whether the CPD will also focus on the successes and failures of ICPD, Mane told IPS, “While it is difficult to predict what particular issues will see the most attention at the Commission this year, we hope for a continued focus on human rights and individual dignity, the realisation of which is a driver for all areas of development.”

“At Pathfinder, we were encouraged by, and applaud, the focus on young people and women’s empowerment found in UNFPA’s most recent review, ‘ICPD Beyond 2014 Global Report’,” she added.

Mane said she is also encouraged to see the reference to sustainability.

Without the engagement of all, including women and young people, as well as realisation of their sexual and reproductive health and rights, sustainable development will be hard to achieve in its truest sense, she said.

The upcoming session will likely touch on the successes and failures of the achievements of the ICPD agenda in the context of identifying key lessons learned “that will carry us forward for greater success in the coming decades.”

These will clearly differ by countries but the major focus needs to be on what is going to be done going forward to accelerate the momentum towards progress, Mane said.

Given that the upcoming session will certainly be shaped by the context of this year and the international focus on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and what comes next, “I believe it is crucial the right to sexual and reproductive health for all people shines through as we discuss the path forward and the post-2015 global development agenda.”

She said progress has certainly been made and momentum is growing through ‘Every Woman Every Child’ and many other efforts by several bilateral partners like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), national governments, philanthropic foundations, civil society and the private sector.

She said they are all working better through joint platforms, but many countries are still very much behind on equitable progress toward the MDG5 targets relating to the improvement of maternal health.

Representatives of 38 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean meeting this week in the Uruguayan capital urged governments in the region to consider modifying their laws on abortion, which are among the most restrictive in the world.

The Montevideo Consensus on Population and Development calls on “States to consider amending their laws, regulations, strategies and public policies relating to the voluntary termination of pregnancy in order to protect the lives and health of women and adolescent girls, to improve their quality of life and to reduce the number of abortions”.

The document was adopted at the end of the first session of the Regional Conference on Population and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, which ran Monday through Thursday.

Daptnhe Cuevas, of the Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Health Network, said their reaction to the outcome of the conference was “jubilation.”

Uruguay’s deputy minister of health, Leonel Briozzo, presided over the regional conference on population and development. Credit: Courtesy of the Public Health Ministry

We feminists came here with a series of clearly outlined proposals that were taken up integrally by the governments, which sent out a strong signal to the world that in Latin America, women’s rights are on the rise.”

Speaking with IPS just after the negotiations came to a close, the Mexican activist described the result as “a resounding success” and praised the governments for “rising to the demands.”

The Montevideo Consensus also urges the governments to “Ensure, in those cases where abortion is legal or decriminalised under the relevant national legislation, the availability of safe, good-quality abortion services for women with unwanted and unaccepted pregnancies”.

In Latin America, first-trimester abortion is only legal on demand in Cuba, Mexico City and, since 2012, Uruguay. In the rest of the countries, it is only allowed in exceptional cases – such as risk to the mother’s life or rape – or under no circumstances at all, such as in Chile, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

This week’s meeting, organised by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Uruguayan government with support from the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), also brought together 24 regional and international agencies and 260 non-governmental organisations.

The document contains over 120 measures concerning the eight priority areas to follow up the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo in 1994.

The recommendations will be the input of Latin America and the Caribbean to the meetings of the U.N. Commission on Population and Development and the General Assembly, to be held in New York in April and September 2014, respectively.

The participants in the meeting numbered over 800, which made it one of the largest intergovernmental conferences in recent years in the region, according to ECLAC.

Cuevas said central demands of the women’s movement were echoed. The final document reaffirmed, for example, the concept that “a secular state is an indispensable condition for the rights of women to be exercised.”

The Montevideo Consensus states that “a secular state is one of the elements fundamental to the full exercise of human rights, the deepening of democracy and the elimination of all forms of discrimination”.

At the close of the conference, Uruguay’s deputy minister of public health, Leonel Briozzo, said the agreement was a sign that “Cairo isn’t moving backwards, but forward.

“We significantly expanded on what Cairo set forth, and we did so from a diversity of viewpoints that were completely respected. As a region that carries the sobriquet of inequality, we are giving an example of democracy,” he said.

“We were able to reach an agreement where no one was trampled on and no one was ignored. This collectively-built construction reflecting agreement on more than 130 points was made by all of us together. It is ours, and it is for the world as a whole.”

The countries also agreed to apply a human rights approach with a gender and intercultural perspective when dealing with population and development matters.

They also committed to spend more on youth, especially in public education, and to implement comprehensive sexual and reproductive health programmes, with a priority on prevention of teen pregnancy.

In addition, they agreed to adopt measures to ensure better quality of life for the elderly.

Another stride forward underscored by Cuevas was the recognition of sexual rights and reproductive rights as separate concepts.

“We took another step forward by recognising them separately,” she said. “What was approved 20 years ago in Cairo referred to reproductive, but not sexual, rights.

“Information has advanced, we have clear concepts, and we know that sexual rights are not necessarily linked to reproduction,” she added. “They’re different issues dealing with different bearers of rights, and on this occasion we managed to get that reflected in the agreement.

“The discussions were very different from discussions at past conferences. I think the tone changed substantially, and it changed because women were seen as people of flesh and blood,” she said.

The declaration also clearly states, she said, “the right to sexual orientations and gender identities. Gender identity can be varied, and the effort had never been made to mention that in a regional accord. That was included for the first time; we had no precedent in any previous consensus, and it is very important.”

Teresa Lanza, head of Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir/Bolivia – the Catholics for Choice partner in Bolivia – told IPS that “the next step is for this to be translated into political will and big enough budgets to ensure that everything that was achieved here truly works and becomes a reality for all women in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

The activists attributed a large part of the advances made to Uruguay’s leadership. Cuevas said that “In the United Nations system, we generally find that the base document doesn’t really tread too much on anyone’s toes, and if you start to compromise, you won’t necessarily win.

“Uruguay set a high starting point, and that made less strident, ideological positions possible in the negotiations and dialogue,” she said.

Point 88 of the declaration calls on countries to “Respect and guarantee the territorial rights of indigenous peoples, including those of peoples living in voluntary isolation and those in the initial phase of contact, with special attention to the challenges presented by extractive industries and other major global investments”.

Chile had initially voiced reservations regarding this point.

Quechua activist Tania Pariona of the Network of Organisations of Indigenous Youth of Peru told IPS that “the work here was collective.”

“The states were fairly open to civil society,” she said. “There has been a good reception, a good vision of what is wanted for the future of the region, and that’s a step forward.”

The face of migration is changing dramatically as women and girls now represent about half of the over 214 million migrants worldwide.

Bolivian migrant in the airport in El Alto, next to La Paz. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

And in some regions of the world, they outnumber their male counterparts, says Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA).

Addressing a weeklong meeting of the 46th session of the U.N. Commission on Population and Development (CPD), which concluded Friday, he pointed out that many women migrate on their own as heads of households, to secure a livelihood.

“Others leave their homes in search of more open societies, to get out of a bad marriage, or to escape all forms of discrimination and gender-based violence, political conflicts, and cultural constraints.”

Like other migrants, Dr. Osotimehin said, women contribute to the well-being of their households, through remittances that benefit the family.

An increasing number of migrants were women and children who bore the brunt of human rights violations around the world.

After a contentious debate, the CPD adopted a belated consensus resolution late Friday, recognising the central role of sexual and reproductive rights giving it prominent visibility.

This year’s CPD session focused on new trends in international migration. And the change in the gender composition among migrants is one of the growing new developments.

Yasmeen Hassan, global director of the New York-based Equality Now, told IPS, “In our experience, the so-called migration of women is deeply linked to trafficking, whether for sex or for domestic labour.”

She said women who see themselves as voluntary migrants find themselves trapped in situations of deep exploitation.

“And these are made possible and exacerbated by their vulnerable legal situation, their lack of social and family contacts, their isolation, their inability often to understand the language or to access systems of protection,” she said.

These factors make them a very attractive target of traffickers, said Hassan, formerly with the U.N. Division for the Advancement of Women and who worked on the implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

Speaking on behalf of the United States, Margaret Pollack said women migrants were often the victims of exploitation and sexual abuse, often lacking access to health care. She said this was particularly true for young migrants and others belonging to vulnerable migrant populations, such as LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) persons and the disabled.

Pollack called for specific policies aimed at helping those groups and for the collection of data on the abuses to which migrants were subjected.

A study released last week by the Geneva-based International Labour Organisation (ILO) said an estimated 600,000 migrant workers “are tricked and trapped into forced labour across the Middle East”.

Based on more than 650 interviews conducted over a two-year period in several countries, including Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the report points out the Middle East alone hosts millions of migrant workers, who in some cases exceed the number of national workers substantially.

In Qatar, about 94 percent of workers are migrants and in Saudi Arabia the figure is over 50 percent.

Last month a Sri Lankan maid, accused of allegedly killing an infant in her care, was beheaded in Saudi Arabia.

“Human trafficking can only be effectively tackled by addressing the systemic gaps in labour migration governance across the region,” Frank Hagemann, ILO deputy regional director for the Arab States, told the commission.

The resolution, adopted by the commission, calls on all member states to ensure migration is integrated into national and sectoral development policies, strategies and programmes.

At the same time, there should be due consideration to the linkages between migration and development in the further implementation of the 1994 Programme of Action adopted at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, and in the elaboration of the post-2015 development agenda.

The resolution specifically calls for the protection of the rights of migrant women and children, including those related to sexual and reproductive rights.

In a new report on migration released last week, the United Nations says new poles of economic growth in the global South have created new migratory flows between countries of the South.

In recent years, there has also been a significant increase in migration from developing to developed countries.

“Growth in migration from the South to the North has generated significant remittance flows to the South that can spur economic growth,” the report said.

And according to the World Bank, officially recorded remittances to developing countries reached 406 billion dollars in 2012.

Many of the rapidly growing economies in East and Southeast Asia, South America and West Africa have become poles for migration within their respective regions, the study adds. In addition, the oil-producing countries of Western Asia and some countries of Southern Europe experienced a rapid growth in the numbers of international migrants between 1990 and 2010.

Following the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, some trends slowed or reversed temporarily, but more recent national data indicate that migration to most of those countries rose in 2011.