Yesterday, 7th of April, which was the first day of the 47th
Commission on Population and Development, the official negotiations took off. However, governments delegations as well as CSO representatives have not
been sitting still over the weekend.
Even before the
weekend, ‘the informals’ had already started: these informal-but-in-reality-not-so-informal
negotiations provide countries (and country groups) the opportunity to give
their first input for the Zero Draft. The Zero Draft is a document written by
the chair of the Commission, and forms the first draft for the final outcome
document of the week. The informal negotiations usually set the tone for the
rest of the Commission: who will be in favor and who will be against certain
population issues.
This is not as
simple as it sounds, as there are many terms related to population and
development that are considered controversial: access to safe abortion, sexual
orientation & gender identity, sexuality education, gender equality – and
believe it or not, but even human rights have been disputed. Government delegations organize around these
issues by having regional meetings, during which the delegations try to find
common ground, map and estimate other country’s positions and to define
strategies for the rest of the week. These strategies go from the EU taking a
strategic, moderate position to avoid opposition, to ‘hard-core’ individual countries like Brazil and South
Africa who aggressively push progressive language in the outcome document by trying
to add more new paragraphs than the Arabic countries can delete.
At the same time,
civil society organizations have been trying to organize themselves over the
weekend by having strategy meetings. The amount of civil society members
attending the CPD has never been as large – this is understandable, considering
that this is the 20th birthday of the Commission of Population and
Development. But strategy meetings with
over 200 members are complicated. How do we coordinate our efforts to push for
progressive language in the final outcome document? Civil society groups have
therefore divided themselves into sub strategy groups related to language,
monitoring, advocacy, communications, etc. Also, updated country standpoints
are shared, regional subgroups are identified, communication is arranged and
daily briefings are scheduled.
In the meantime,
the UN has been trying to facilitate the process of having a huge number of government
delegations and civil society organizations present in their building. With
little success so far – the conference rooms reserved are so small that not
everybody fits in and negotiations are called off; UN ground passes are only
provided for two days instead of the normal five; the UN building is still
under construction; and the Vienna café is
still the only café in the building, which means bad coffee all week. At the
same time, a huge amount of government delegates and members of civil society
organizations keep running around, organizing, negotiating, lobbying,
strategizing, opposing the opposition, stealing each other’s documents and
fighting for the development agenda they stand for; that is the chaos of the
UN.
by Floortje, from CHOICE for Youth and Sexuality
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