FES International Policy Analysis Unit

FES Journal - International Politics and Society

BEIJING + 10 IN ASIA PACIFIC – PLANNED ACTIVITIES

The year 2005 is an important year for the rights and the advancement of women, because the global community is facing three major anniversaries concerning women's issue:

Firstly, the 30th anniversary of the International Year for Women, proclaimed by the United Nations in 1975, which led to the International Decade for Women (1976-1985)

Secondly, the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies for the advancement of Women and

Thirdly, the 10th year anniversary of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women which took place in Beijing, China, in September 1995. The final document of this conference is the Bejing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPFA).

The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPFA) is one of the most remarkable documents to emerge from an inter-governmental meeting and a landmark for the women’s movement in more than one way. It was signed by 189 participating countries which committed themselves to implement the BPFA. But since the realization of women’s rights and the advancement of women are far from being realized, a continuous monitoring of the BPFA commitments is still to be done at international, regional, sub-regional and national levels.

One of the so-called Beijing + 10 processes at regional level is the forthcoming Asia Pacific Forum by NGOs for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality to Commemorate the 1995 Beijing Conference on 1 - 3 July 2004 in Bangkok. It will be entitled “Celebrating women’s gains… confronting emerging issues.”

There is a need to review the BPFA implementation, its gaps and the future course of action. NGOs can help to identify the implementation gaps and problems and emerging issues. The main output will be the “Purple Book” containing the conclusions and consensus of the women’s movement on how much women’s life conditions and social status have changed ten years since Beijing, or thirty years since the International Year of Women. The “Purple Book” will be a continuation of a document series produced by Asia Pacific NGOs. Therefore this NGO Conference is important in order to provide substantive inputs for the Asia Pacific High Level Intergovernmental Meeting organized by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) scheduled for 6-9 September 2004 in Bangkok.

The outputs of the NGO Forum and the Intergovernmental Meeting will input to the Extended Meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) for the Review and Appraisal of Implementation of the BPFA is to be held in March 2005 in New York. So far it is not planned to start any text negotiation on the BPFA commitments in fear of conservative backlashes. Unlike in June 2000, when the UN General Assembly held its 23rd Special Session “Women 2000: Gender Equality, Development and Peace for the 21st Century” (so-called Beijing + 5), there will be no BPFA (+10) Special Session of the General Assembly in June 2005.

The importance for convening an Asia Pacific NGO Forum for BPFA (+10) was stressed at an informal consultation of Asia Pacific NGOs, organized on 22 July 2003 in Bangkok. It was attended by 17 representatives from women NGOs and was chaired by Pawadee Tonguthai (Thai Women’s Watch). The achievements of the last decade were assessed, issues were revisited and strategies to feedback into regional/sub-regional government meetings on BPFA (+10) on the situation of women in the Asia Pacific designed. New and emerging issues such as globalization, militarism and fundamentalism and how women are placed in these specific contexts were discussed. The participants highlighted that it is important to reaffirm the commitment to BPFA and to ensure that there is no backsliding.

In the past, within the Beijing process, NGOs in the Asia-Pacific Region organized themselves with the objective to consolidate the Asian and Pacific NGO’s position on issues confronting women in the region and to ensure that these were accurately reflected in the document produced at the Beijing Conference in 1995.The recommendations of these meetings were summarized in the "The Yellow Book", which became the major NGO lobbying tool at the Beijing meetings. The lobbying was so successful that many of the recommendations from "The Yellow Book" were incorporated in the BPFA. The outcomes of the Asia Pacific Regional NGO Symposium held in September 1999 in preparation for Beijing + 5 were contained in the report “Asia-Pacific Women 2000: Gender Equality, Development and Peace for the 21st Century”, referred to as the “Big Blue Book”.

Convening the Asia-Pacific NGO Forum in July 2004 will require the initiation of processes at the sub-regional level. Within each sub-region, so called Focal Points will discuss the outcome of this forum, give their feedback on the issues, strategize national processes and prepare a calendar of events for the NGO processes for each sub-region. The Southeast Asian Focal Point for the Asian sub-regions is the Centre for Asia Pacific Women in Politics (CAPWIP) based in Manila.

Background of the Country Studies on “Women in Power and Decision-making”

The Regional Gender Project of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Manila will support the conduct of five country studies in Southeast Asia on ‘Gender Equality, Equity and Non-discrimination on Power Relations and Agency’ coordinated by the NGO SEAWATCH based in Manila. The focus of the proposed country papers will be the Agenda point number 7 of the Beijing Declaration for Action (BPFA), which is Women in Power and Decision-making. The countries included are Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand.

SEAWATCH is a network of women organizations in Southeast Asia that is committed to monitoring government compliance of the Beijing Platform for Action. The SEAWATCH network produced an alternative NGO Report for the UN World Conference on Women in 1995, that was incorporated into the broader Asia Pacific Women Watch Report. SEAWATCH embarked on a project on developing innovative indicators that led to the publication of a monograph entitled “Monitoring and Evaluation: the Asia Pacific Experience”. SEAWATCH along with other regional watch groups of the Asia Pacific Woman Watch will play a mayor role in convening the Asia Pacific NGO Forum in July 2004.

The low level of women in decision-making remains to be a problem in all Southeast Asian countries. There is a need for more female office-bearers and political women leaders. In Southeast Asia, the percentage of seats in parliament held by women is still low ranking between 8.0% and 27.3% and far from the thirty per cent desired by the United Nations. According to the UNDP Human Development Report 2003. In only 12 countries worldwide more than thirty per cent of the parliamentarians are women.