CEDAW: TREATY FOR THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN

Inaction on a global Treaty for the Rights of Women has put the United States in the company of countries like Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan and Somalia, reported The Chicago Tribune on June 19. But last week the U.S. moved one step closer to joining 169 other nations that have ratified it since 1979. Linda Tarr-Whelan, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, said the treaty "gives women and like-minded men in those countries who care about women's human rights a way to press their own governments forward." Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA, the sole woman on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also noted, "We often make statements to other countries about their treatment of women, and we have very little credibility. The first thing you hear back from the diplomatic people is 'Wait a minute. You're critical of us, but you haven't even ratified the treaty.'" Read: The Chicago Tribune and Knight Ridder

"I wish Mr. Ashcroft could come here to Pakistan, to talk to women like Zainab Noor," wrote Nicholas Kristof in his New York Times' June 18 commentary. "Because, frankly, the [Treaty for the Rights of Women] has almost nothing to do with American women, who already enjoy the rights the treaty supports -- opportunities to run for political office, to receive an education, to choose one's own spouse, to hold jobs." Kristof went on to tell: "Mrs. Noor, a pretty woman with soft eyes and a gold nose ring, grew up in the Pakistani countryside and like her three sisters she never received a day's education. At the age of 15 she was married off by her parents, becoming the second wife of the imam of a local mosque. He beat her relentlessly." At the end of his commentary, Kristof asked, "Do we really want to side with the Taliban mullahs, who, like Mr. Ashcroft, fretted that the treaty imposes sexual equality? Or do we dare side with third-world girls who die because of their gender, more than 2,000 of them today alone?" Read: The New York Times, St. Paul Pioneer Press and further support for CEDAW by Sens. Joseph R. Biden and Barbara Boxer's June 13 op ed in The San Francisco Chronicle and a June 12 letter by Amelia Parker of Amnesty International in The Knoxville News (TN). As expected, The Washington Times ran a June 13 editorial opposing CEDAW.

[NOTE: For more information on the Treaty for the Rights of Women go to: www.womenstreaty.org.]

SALON.COM FEATURES UN POPULATION FUND

Salon.com ran a June 13 feature story that said President Bush's freeze on $34 million that Congress appropriated for the United Nations Population Fund marked "a complete turnaround" from his earlier position. "What I find so outrageous is that Bush withheld this $34 million based solely on testimony from the Population Research Institute, an arm of a far-right group," said New York Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney. "PRI is the only organization that has ever made these allegations. The administration is going against the will of Congress and the international community by allowing a small band of extremists to hamstring its foreign policy." UNFPA Director of Information Stirling Scruggs said 145 diplomats had visited the Chinese counties where UNFPA operates and none had raised concerns about what they saw. Read at Salon.com

UN UPDATE: "ISLAMIC BLOC, CHRISTIAN RIGHT TEAM UP TO LOBBY U.N."

According to The Washington Post's June 17 story, conservative U.S. Christian organizations have joined forces with Islamic governments to halt the expansion of sexual and political protections and rights for gays, women and children at United Nations conferences. "The new alliance, which coalesced during the past year, has received a major boost from the Bush administration, which appointed antiabortion activists to key positions on U.S. delegations to U.N. conferences on global economic and social policy," noted The Post. Austin Ruse, Founder and President of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, a conservative organization that attends U.N. social conferences, said, "We look at them as allies, not necessarily as friends. We have realized that without countries like Sudan, abortion would have been recognized as a universal human right in a U.N. document." In response, Adrienne Germaine, President of the International Women's Health Coalition, said, "This alliance shows the depths of perversity of the [U.S.] position. On the one hand we're presumably blaming these countries for unspeakable acts of terrorism, and at the same time we are allying ourselves with them in the oppression of women." Read: The Washington Post

SAVING WOMEN'S LIVES

Violence against Women

The New York Times was among many newspapers reporting June 6 on the State Department's study that found up to 4 million victims of human trafficking worldwide over the past year, 50,000 of them in the United States. The department threatened sanctions against countries not working to curb the practice, but critics pointed out that some countries may have received better rankings than they deserved. "Here and abroad, the victims of trafficking toil under inhuman conditions - in brothels, sweatshops, fields and even in private homes," said Secretary of State Colin Powell in The Washington Times story. Read: The Washington Times, The New York Times, The Associated Press and a June 6 commentary by The Montreal Gazette (Canada)

The Chicago Tribune reported June 5 on health officials' estimates that 40,000 women in Italy, mainly immigrants from Africa, have suffered "some form of female circumcision." In recent years, Britain and Sweden have passed tough laws outlawing female genital mutilation. Parents who allow their daughters to be mutilated face prison terms and can lose custody of their children. But Cristiana Scoppa, of the Italian Association for Women in Development, thinks this is the wrong approach. "If you have a special law that applies only to the immigrant community, the community closes up, and it scares the practice underground. This approach only nourishes the market for doctors willing to do it." The St. Paul Pioneer Press (MN) in its June 2 story on FGM in Kenya cited World Health Organization estimates that 130 million girls and women in 28 nations in the Middle East and Africa have undergone some form of circumcision. Read: Chicago Tribune and The St. Paul Pioneer Press

Women's Rights and Policy Worldwide

"On a cold March day, the bleak monotony of a North Korean prison work detail was broken when a squad of male guards arrived and herded new women prisoners together," reported The New York Times' June 10 story. Song Myung Hak, 33, a former prisoner, said six pregnant prisoners were taken from his work unit in the Shinuiju Provincial Detention Camp two years ago and given abortion shots. "After the miscarriage shots, the women were forced back to work." The Times noted: China's deportation of illegal immigrants from North Korea has sharply increased the number of pregnant women in North Korean prisons. "Defectors, male and female, are reviled as traitors and counterrevolutionaries when they are returned to North Korea, but women who have become pregnant, especially by Chinese men, face special abuse," the article said. Read: The New York Times

Washington Post: "Building Women's Rights House by House in Bangladesh"

On June 11, The Washington Post reported that when Mufaweza Khan and Peggy Curlin volunteered in the late1960s for the World Health Organization's campaign to inoculate urban slum dwellers against smallpox, it was a life-altering experience. "Wherever we went, women were asking us about family planning," Curlin said. The many malnourished women they met could not keep up with feeding their growing families. She and Khan set up a group of female volunteers who went door to door "to provide family planning advice to Muslim women who never left their homes and had no contact with the outside world." Curlin, now president of the Center for Development and Population Activities, said, "Everybody told us it would be difficult, but the first woman to accept our services was the wife of a mullah in Dhaka." The network started with five women in one neighborhood and grew to involve scores of outpatient clinics and programs in 13 provinces. Now called Concerned Women for Family Development, the network was the building block for women's empowerment actions and micro-credit projects, and now works on education and income-generating projects as well as programs on reproductive health and AIDS. Read: The Washington Post

For more women's policy news read The New York Times' June 6 article on the growing role Afghan women are taking in shaping Afghanistan's constitution.

Reproductive Health Policy

A Washington Post June 4 story asked, "Do statistics save lives?" It quoted Duff Gillespie, of the Bureau for Global Health at USAID, and Martin Vaessen, director of demographic and health surveys (DHS) at ORC Macro International Inc., on the healing power of numbers at a June 3 briefing sponsored by the Population Reference Bureau. Gillespie recalled that DHS data revealed a disturbing new pattern in the late 1990s: the rate of new HIV infections was rising faster for women than for men, particularly in developing countries such as Uganda. "The Ugandan government immediately took action," said Gillespie. "Among other things, it began producing radio spots that encouraged Ugandan women to delay having sex and offered them voluntary reproductive health counseling and testing." Read: The Washington Post

In India, doctors slammed a new policy banning ultrasound scans for pregnant women, saying it "punished the entire population instead of targeting those committing female feticide," reported Agence France Presse on June 4. Dr. S.C.L Gupta, President of the Delhi Medical Association, said while the government had "noble intentions" in the new law, it was taking a "serious gamble" with health. "Not everyone is demented or practices female feticide in India. It is important to monitor the fetus through ultrasound and it is unfair to punish the entire population for the crimes of a few," the doctor said.

The Associated Press reported June 4 that female Cambodian lawmakers were aghast that draft legislation for special AIDS prevention education singled out women, arguing that it was "promiscuous Cambodian men who needed more information about the disease." Lawmaker Ly Kim Leang said it was unfair to Cambodian women who are being victimized by men's sexual behavior. "It is them, not just women, who need to have more special education," she said. Read: The Associated Press

"In 1979, when they seized power, the clerics called on Iranians to have more children to become soldiers in defense of their country and Islam," reported the Associated Press on June 13. Now, however, with a burgeoning population, authorities have launched a family planning campaign featuring vasectomies. Hasan Doroudi tells two men in their forties, who have more than a half-dozen children each, that "Prosperity is not necessarily to have more children and money but to be more knowledgeable.'' He says that instead of several children, "Let's have vasectomies to avoid unwanted children and ensure prosperity for the ones we have." Read: The Associated Press

Read the June 2 stories by The New York Times and The Associated Press on Switzerland's latest ruling easing its stiff controls on access to abortion.

ENVIRONMENT

The Associated Press reported June 5 that the murky depths are getting an online road map, thanks to the United Nations and a host of scientific institutions that are launching an Internet atlas of the world's oceans. "After a decade of planning and more than 2½ years of development, the U.N. Oceans Atlas went online June 5 - World Environment Day - with 14 global maps, links to hundreds of other sites, and more than 2,000 documents on 900 subjects ranging from climate change to poisonous algae," according to AP. "This is a very ambitious and important partnership for monitoring, diagnosing and we hope helping to heal the great oceans of the world," said former U.S. Sen. Timothy Wirth, who heads the United Nations Foundation. The foundation provided the main $500,000 grant that funded the project. Read: The Associated Press and to view the atlas, go to: UN Atlas of the Oceans

For coverage of the World Summit on Sustainable Development preparatory committee meeting in Bali, read: The Associated Press and Reuters.

AIDS WORLDWIDE

South Africa Reports HIV Prevalence Rates Stabilized

The New York Times reported June 11 that the number of HIV infections in South Africa appears to have leveled off at about one-quarter of the adult population, according to an annual survey by the Health Ministry. The reasons were not clear, epidemiologists warned, adding it was still too soon to say whether the epidemic would now decline or had reached what would be a devastatingly high saturation point. Some experts cautioned that the rate of infection could still be quickening. But Health Minister Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang told reporters in the capital, Pretoria, that for now, "We can confidently say that the prevalence rate has stabilized." The study found an apparent increase in HIV infection among women in their 30s that more than offset a decrease in infections among younger women, but Dr. Tshabalala-Msimang said the decline in infections among the young indicated that the government's AIDS education effort among young people might be starting to show results. Read: The New York Times and The Financial Times - The Barcelona conference on AIDS is on July 7-12.

African Clerics in Nairobi for Conference on AIDS

Some of Africa's top clerics gathered in Nairobi June 9-12 to discuss how the religious community could make up for lost time and become a new voice for the legions of children devastated by AIDS, according to The Los Angeles Times' June 10 story. "By 2010, the United Nations expects 20 million children in sub-Saharan Africa to be so-called AIDS orphans, their parents having succumbed to the deadly disease," the story said. "Through our silence and denial, we have contributed to increased stigma and exclusion of people living with HIV/AIDS and their families," said Twaib Mukuye, a leader of Uganda's Muslim community. "Now we are here to launch a continent-wide jihad on AIDS." According to The New York Times June 11 story, Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF, said, "It was not realistic to expect that all the leaders would agree on such contentious issues as the need to use condoms." However, she noted, religious leaders "have a unique ability to raise issues of sexuality with their followers." Read: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press

U.S. Corporations Fight Against AIDS Worldwide

At an anti-AIDS gala that drew both celebrities and protesters, former President Clinton urged the Bush administration to come up with $2.4 billion annually to fight the disease around the world, according to a June 13 story by the Associated Press. AP noted that Former U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who heads the Global Business Coalition, said the message from the demonstrators was that companies weren't doing much to fight AIDS. "I agree with that message. That's why we're here," he said, to loud applause. "The 75 companies are the companies that are doing something, but they may not be doing enough. So I welcome the demonstrators. We're on the same side." USA Today reported June 11 that Holbrooke noted HIV/AIDS' death toll of 3 million a year in sub-Saharan Africa alone was 10 times more than from all of the continent's armed conflicts combined. "Any public or private official who has a role to play in the world today will someday look back and ask, 'How did I not do anything about HIV?'" Read: The Associated Press and USA Today

Read about the Bush administration's new assistance program to fight the spread of AIDS overseas, with special emphasis on medications to reduce mother-to-child transmission of the disease, in The Wall Street Journal on June 7.

Read the June 4 story about Microbicides, a female-controlled substance that can be used vaginally to prevent the transmission of the HIV virus, in The San Jose Mercury News.

EDITORIALS AND OPINIONS

"Man may, quite literally, destroy his closest animal relative - and countless other species, too," wrote Jane Goodall, a leading primatologist, in a June 12 op ed in The Guardian (London). "It's not just the natural world that will suffer. The human population is set to grow by two billion by 2032. The lowering of water tables and desertification will lead to severe water shortages for nearly half of humanity by this time. Unless things change, serious health problems are bound to escalate due to malnutrition, extreme poverty, polluted air, water and food, and viruses resistant to antibiotics." Goodall provided some hope "if our leaders take action. We already have an excellent blueprint to combat these alarming trends, which will benefit all parts of the world, not just rich nations or developing countries." Read: The Guardian

The above analysis was written by Elena M. H. Cabatu and Kathy Bonk at the Communications Consortium Media Center, 1200 New York Avenue, NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20005, 202/326-8700.

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