Beijing Conference: United Nations Agenda for Women Falls Short

But platform asserts religious-freedom rights.

The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women and the parallel forum for nongovernmental organizations (NGOS) in September promised to bring an agenda for promoting equality, development, and peace to the world from a woman’s point of view.

But the 30,000 women who gathered in Beijing and Huairou, China, were unable to develop a comprehensive global agenda for women that all 189 national delegations could affirm. Mary Ann Glendon, head of the Vatican delegation and a Harvard Law School professor, said the controversial Platform for Action is “full of promise, but short on commitment.”

The 120-page document was able to develop a consensus on many matters, including condemnations of brideburning, economic discrimination, rape, and female infanticide. However, consensus remained out of reach on such topics as abortion rights, homosexual rights, and sex education.

Because economic and social conditions vary widely worldwide, delegations came with dramatically different agendas. Aloysie Inymba, a Rwandan delegate, commented, “I’m here because my people are starving, and we want to discuss a cure for malaria, not abortions.”

REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM? The platform lists scores of problems affecting women, with corresponding action steps to be taken by governments, intergovernmental organizations, and NGOS. The accompanying Beijing Declaration is a “women’s charter.” It states that “women’s rights are human rights” and calls for the right of all females, including girls, to control their own fertility. The document also urges equal sharing of family responsibilities by women and men so that women can achieve equal participation “in all spheres of society.”

Some 51 countries in attendance expressed reservations to specific sections of the platform. Representatives from several nations objected that sections on sexual rights violated their national laws, culture, and moral teaching. Malaysia, for example, said that “family” is formed only out of marriage between a man and a woman, their children, and their extended family, and that only married couples should bear children. Libya stated, “We don’t accept any imposition from any culture or nation.”

Additionally, some leaders from the hundreds of NGO delegations in attendance found much to object to within the document. The platform itself affirms a girl’s rights to “information, privacy, confidentiality, respect, and informed consent” over parental rights. Conference attendee Diane Knippers, president of the Washington, D.C.—based Institute on Religion and Democracy, said the platform significantly undermines parental authority.

RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION: Many Christians saw the platform’s call to secure freedom of religious expression as a major achievement.

“This victory on the role of religion in women’s lives made it worth the trip,” said Knippers, also cochair of the eight-woman Ecumenical Coalition on Women and Society team in Beijing.

The platform acknowledges that “religion, spirituality, and belief play a central role in the lives of millions of women and men” and “can contribute to fulfilling [their] moral, ethical and spiritual needs.” The acknowledgment proved controversial and took three days to hammer out.

Bisa Williams-Manigault, the U.S. delegate who negotiated the language, told CT that the European Union complained that this was not “an appropriate issue for a women’s document to talk about.” Williams-Manigault hoped the United States would be a “showcase country on how this can work” to help, for example, American Muslim women who “have been denied jobs because they wear a veil.”

Although much news coverage focused on the inhospitable conditions in China, about 50 Christian women attending the conference joined a congregation of 2,000 at Beijing’s Chong Wen Men Church September 3.

“It’s amazing that we’ve traveled so far to hear our own hymns,” said Jean Stromberg, a Baptist, who directs the World Council of Churches office in New York.

Later during the conference, Glendon, the first woman ever to head a Vatican delegation, noted that the Vatican agreed with many passages in the platform. But on the whole, there was “ideological imbalance.” In her address, she said “irresponsible sexual behavior” was the cause of much suffering, disease, and poverty from which women suffer.

PRO-FAMILY FOCUS: Organizing themselves as the “Family Life Coalition,” pro-life and traditional family advocates from around the world rallied in an intensive lobbying effort for the platform to validate women in their roles as wives, mothers, and caregivers.

Many conversative organizations, including Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, and the International Right to Life Federation, labored alongside Roman Catholics and moderate Muslims for respect for motherhood and the traditional family, and resisted expansion of abortion and sexual rights beyond the hard-fought consensus achieved at last year’s Cairo population conference (CT, Oct. 24, 1994, p. 82).

“As an evangelical, I want to say how grateful I am to you Catholics who have been fighting this battle for so long,” Gloria Laurenson of Choose Life Canada, said in one pro-family gathering. Throughout the conference, evangelicals experienced hostility from conference organizers to religiously orthodox viewpoints.

Some official delegates viewed the presence of pro-family attendees as a reactionary obstacle to progress. Timothy Wirth, a member of the U.S. delegation, criticized the “political agenda” of pro-family activists. “The wonderful opportunities in this [platform] reach very deeply, much beyond this sort of superficial political controversy raised by some quasi-moralists,” Wirth told CT.

Patricia Licuanan, chairperson of the Main Committee, also had reservations about a “conservative backlash.” She said, “The reason why we have had these battles is that there are men who feel very threatened.”

RESPECTING THE FAMILY: Final text of the platform was not developed until about 5 A.M. of the last day of the conference. In spite of the many disputes and disagreements among differing points of view, there was significant common ground on many concerns, including:

• Respect for the family, not “families,” as the basic societal unit.

• Refusal to include “sexual orientation” (which would include lesbianism) as a protected status for women.

• Condemnation for “female infanticide,” forced sterilizations, rape, and girl-child trafficking.

• Assertion that “freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is inalienable and must be universally enjoyed,” including freedom in worship, practice, and teaching, and the right to convert.

However, there continued to be sharp disagreement over sex education, family planning, abortion rights, and children’s rights.

Much of the activity of lobbying groups took place at the parallel NGO forum, where more than 4,000 workshops were held by hundreds of women’s organizations. At the handful of workshops sponsored by religious conservatives, there were several incidents where reactionaries, including lesbian activists, disrupted the proceedings with shouting and angry retorts.

Intolerance for prolife women also surfaced at the main conference. When Kenyan physician Margaret Ogola, who staffs that country’s largest clinic for AIDS children, petitioned to address the main session, she was grilled about her connections. UN coordinator for NGO affairs Virginia Sauerwein said the organizers had the responsibility to keep out pro-life groups that were trying to “unbalance the proceedings.”

The use of the word gender and its definition was sharply contested by conservatives, who asserted that its use in the platform would help to legitimize homosexual and transsexual behavior CT, Aug. 14, 1995, p. 55).

The controversy was settled early on, however. Conference leaders said gender is “to be interpreted and understood as it was in ordinary, generally accepted usage.” According to chairperson Licuanan, this means “socially constructed roles,” not biological ones.

THE PLATFORM’S IMPACT: The worldwide influence of the platform itself will not be known for years to come. There are no new funds to carry out its agenda, and it is not an individually ratified treaty or convention.

According to Ellen Lukas, who worked inside the UN for a decade, it has no binding, legal authority. “It has moral equality now and could lay the groundwork for a future UN treaty.”

Licuanan admitted that it would take “a lot of social pressure on countries to stick to their agreements.” Furthermore, strategies for implementation are “the responsibility of each country,” with respect for their religious, ethical, and cultural values.

Yet, one thing is certain. The platform’s language will shape future UN documents. U.S. lead negotiator Melinda Kimble notes platform committees “drew on, as accepted in UN practice, language from prior texts.”

The issue of redefining sexual rights is not a settled matter. At least two more UN conferences are planned for this century, the first being Habitat II in Istanbul next June.

A second conference is expected in 1998, the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If human rights are revisited, new ones could be invented, such as sexual rights regardless of age or marital status and sexual orientation in both public and private settings.

Meanwhile, more than 300 pro-family NGOs, representing nearly one billion Christians worldwide, have returned home from the China conference to network, expand, educate, motivate their churches, and pray.

By Paige Comstock Cunningham in Beijing with reports from Patricia Lefevere and Alice Bratton.

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