“Live” from the UN…

[I have friends hopping all 'bout the globe, doing creative, legal, and educational work on women's and race/ethnicity issues. Every once and a while I'll be posting dispatches. This one is from one of my old college roomates, Supriya Pillai. We lived right here. Anyway, below please find her impressions on this March's meetings held by the UN Commission on the Status of Women. I wonder, Eyes on Hillary, First Wives Club Contenders, Politicas, and Are We Ready? has there been anything from any US candidates on any international women's issues?]

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by Supriya Pillai

I’ve been in the basement of the UN for all of last week and I’ll be there until the end of this week. The Commission on the Status of Women meets every year to discuss government’s various commitments to a particular theme having to do with women. General, I know and, annoyingly, pretty non-binding, but the theatre I have been witness to has really been something. Watching world politics unfold in one room as people comb through language and text, the silent fights become more vocal. Diplomacy is just a nice way of fighting. Like, when most delegates take the mic, they respectively thank their other delegates, the chair and then they proceed with their “fuck yous”– but ever so gently.

This year, the theme is the Girl Child. Interesting to note, there are no international treaties, documents, etc that indicate that girls can express their human rights. Rather, there are places where girls are protected (i.e. by their families), but in and of themselves, they are not entitled to inalienable human rights.

Here’s the thing, the US is one of the very few countries that hasn’t even ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), let alone the Convention of the Rights of the Child or the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)… and they are proposing new language. It’s really arrogant. The US won’t ratify the UDHR because they claim we cannot have universal human rights when we believe in state sovereignty. To be honest, the US just wants to be exempt… exempt from owning up to torture at Abu Ghraib, owning up to starting a war when war wasn’t necessary, owning up to the systematic imprisonment of black folks and latinos in this country… I mean the list is long and basically they want to be exempt from fulfilling human rights and exempt from being held accountable for violating them.

So, what gives them the right to introduce any new language, to boss around other countries, and then to denounce the whole UN system at once? And for those of you who think that the UN is a waste of time, that’s our government’s propoganda and I can’t figure out, if that’s what they think, why they’re present and why they’re fighting so hard.

This year the US is [presenting] 2 resolutions. One got nixed today and the other will most likely get trashed too. They’ve put their hands into the pot of female infanticide, which we can all agree we are against, but then they had to throw in sex selective abortion. Our administration is so against abortion that they will fight battles outside of the country (since they can’t win them inside the country) to try to gain allies to deny women the right to control their own bodies and choose an abortion.

Another government’s delegation said to me and some other colleagues today, “I don’t understand why the US has to meddle in abortion, opposing it so much, when it’s legal in their own country.”

The other resolution is against forced and early marriage… I won’t go into it but it’s really the US’s back up… they have thrown in language on sex selective abortion into this resolution today with no negotiation from others… so really very diplomatic, to say the least. It’s all confusing and doesn’t make sense, but they are letting the world know that they are going to fight abortion wherever and however they can.

China has been funny… they blame all of the problems that the girl child faces today on globalization. They aren’t far off the mark, but they don’t see themselves as accountable in any of it.

Our friends from South America lobby in a block called Mercosur and they are doing a phenomenal job. Brazil, in particular, is very progressive.

Every year the Palestinians [present] a resolution (through another country since Palestine is not considered a member state) on women and girls living under foreign occupation. And, every year it gets shot down (by guess who? The US and Israel). But, this year we hope will be the year that it gets recognized.