A Crash Course in the UN, Women and NGOs (or Why Civil Society Matters)
by Sallie Chaballier (AAWE Paris)
“AAWE is a member of FAWCO, an NGO in Special Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council” - have you ever wondered what that blurb on AAWE publications actually means? In the past six months, I have experienced firsthand how meaningful and how powerful that phrase really is. I feel like I’ve had a crash course in the UN system, a graduate seminar in gender equality issues, as well as an epiphany of understanding where NGOs fit in, all thanks to volunteering to attend two UN events as part of the FAWCO delegation. The first, the Geneva NGO FORUM Beijing +20 UN ECE Regional Review last November inspired me to attend the second, the 59th annual UN Commission on the Status of Women in New York in early March.
The UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) is “the principal global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women. A functional commission of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), it was established by Council resolution 11(II) of 21 June 1946. The CSW is instrumental in promoting women’s rights, documenting the reality of women’s lives throughout the world, and shaping global standards on gender equality and the empowerment of women.” (http://www.unwomen.org/en/csw)
My FAWCO colleagues and I all volunteered to join the FAWCO delegation and paid our own way, mostly camping out with friends or family. Eager to experience the 20th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995, we came from as far away as Perth, Australia and Dhahran, Saudi Arabia as well as Paris, Berlin, The Hague, Brussels, Basel, Rome, Vienna and elsewhere. We began our week (actually the first of the two weeks of CSW sessions) with the New York NGO Committee on the Status of Women’s “Consultation Day” at the iconic Apollo Theater with several living legends: Gertrude Mongella, Secretary General of the Beijing Conference in 1995 and former Assistant Secretary General of the UN, and Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as well as a host of other speakers. From there we moved to Times Square for the “March4Women” to and a rally to celebrate International Women’s Day - an exhilarating kickoff.
How can I possibly describe my week as one of around 8600 delegates from over 1100 women’s NGOs worldwide, rubbing elbows with hundreds more who were representing their countries as part of official delegations? Humbling, inspiring, confusing, illuminating, frustrating, hopeful, overwhelming, galvanizing…are just a few words that come to mind.
Each day, there were “side events” at the UN all day held by UN committees and national permanent missions competing for delegates’ attention with the “parallel events” organized by NGOs in several locations outside UN headquarters. I came to see the CSW as a microcosm of the whole UN: official plenary sessions with formal reports by country delegations, UN committees - where much of the serious policy work gets done - holding side events, and then NGOs hosting parallel events. This multiplicity somehow made sense, a reflection of the diversity of womankind.
Everywhere, I listened to incredibly impressive women, young and old, from a passionate British advocate for widows (of all ages), to a young Kenyan woman parliamentarian acknowledging a senior woman Kenyan parliamentarian for igniting her ambition to engage in politics at the age of 8, to an Egyptian woman activist lamenting the restriction of women’s rights since the protests of 2013. I was heartened by the committed participation of many young women - university and even high school students - as well as by the engagement of some enlightened men who understand that gender equality benefits everyone. Indeed, the necessity of involving men and boys in efforts to achieve gender equality was a recurring theme throughout the sessions I attended - very meaningful to me as the mother of two sons.
When people express frustration with the United Nations, I wonder how much worse things would be without it. Listening to women from civil society organizations in Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, Libya, and other countries ravaged by war is a profoundly humbling experience. While there is still much work that women in the US or France have to do to achieve genuine gender equality, we at least live in societies where civil society is recognized and can function freely. It is the women in these fragile countries (and elsewhere) who are the agents of peace - what they are accomplishing under extreme circumstances is amazing.
I learned many lessons from my brief exposure to the UN system: why civil society matters, how women are making their voices heard through civil society organizations, how NGOs feed in to the UN system, and even where AAWE fits into it all through FAWCO as an organization of international women. It should not come as a surprise to AAWE members that individuals can bring about change - after all, our association was founded to redress inequities in US citizenship legislation, and AAWE members were also at the forefront of efforts to obtain the right for Americans to vote from overseas. As an organization of women helping women, AAWE has a voice - we all have a voice.
Coming of age, the concepts of “women’s rights” and “human rights” (think persecuted male writers) held different connotations for me. I viewed human rights essentially through the lenses of political freedom and freedom of expression — after all, this was a couple of decades before Hilary Clinton famously declared at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 that “women’s rights are human rights”. Over the years, the world changed and so did I. Gone was the old bi-polar world of East versus West, and as I evolved from professional “Sovietologist” to stay-at-home mother to nearly full-time volunteer, my own interests and priorities changed. In recent years, through my work with FAWCO, my abiding commitment to human rights has fused with my abiding feminism and found a focus, giving me a renewed sense of purpose.
My raison d’être crystallized back in November listening to Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, a charismatic and compelling Zimbabwean lawyer who co-chairs the NGO CSW at the UN in Geneva, describe her path from a rural village to the practice of human rights law. I am keenly and humbly aware of the immense privilege I have enjoyed in my personal and professional lives: an education, an unimpeded career, health care, property, voting rights - things which we take for granted are not the norm for millions of women worldwide. I am overcome with admiration for women from around the world who have fought hard to claim their rights. Despite our superficial differences, an overwhelming sense of sisterhood among all women prevailed throughout the UN events I have attended.
Why, then, do we do what we do? Worldwide, women in civil society often are volunteers - in schools, in communities, in NGOS. We don’t HAVE to make a difference yet we are compelled to try — because it is the right thing to do. Time and again, pressure from the periphery is what makes governments change and moves societies ahead. We women are resilient, resourceful, resolute - and we can change the world, one woman at a time.
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