By: Ayesha Khan
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| CSO Forum participants display solidarity with protesters in Hong Kong. Photo Credits: Suri Kempe. |
The Beijing +25
Asia and Pacific Civil Society Forum held recently in Bangkok brought
together over 300 activists representing 250 organizations and networks for a
three-day convening. Participants assessed progress since 1995 and crafted
a statement of demands to place before the Asia-Pacific Ministerial Conference on the
Beijing+25 Review that followed the Forum.
The hashtags
#FeministsWantSystemChange and #AngerHopeAction made clear the gathering was a
marker of how little had changed on the ground since the ambitious Beijing
Platform for Action was agreed at the 4th World Conference for Women
in 1995.
Yet, a generation of new
activists has come of age since then, with powerful concerns that have pushed
the Beijing agenda forward, such as the rights of LGBTQI and disabled persons,
and the need to address digital safety. Women around the world are gravely
affected by the consequences of climate change, the rise of anti-democratic
populism, and a backlash against feminism, which makes 1995 seem more like a
peak moment rather than a starting point for the broader transformation
anticipated at the time. With spaces for engagement shrinking, inequalities
growing, and global regression of hard won sexual and reproductive rights,
there is a lot of anger.
In an attempt to identify
feminist ways forward, discussions on the first day highlighted that the
women’s movement needed to become more inclusive and build deeper grassroots
support. Principles of feminist leadership too need to be upheld, such as promoting
the practices of reflexivity, care and ethics. It is time for the movement to
become re-politicized, strengthen its ties across the older and younger
generation, build inter-movement solidarity, and pay greater attention to
intersectionality.
The Forum opened on the first day of the #16Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence, marking International
Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (VAW). Three panels were concerned with VAW
– including at the workplace and amongst transgender people. UN Special
Rapporteur on VAW, Dubravka Šimonovic,
spoke eloquently about the struggle to have VAW recognized as a violation of
women’s human rights, reminding the audience that at Beijing in 1995 this
recognition was just one year old. She said much progress has been made since
then in our global understanding of the problem and putting enforcement
mechanisms in place. In a tacit acknowledgement of the achievements of #MeToo
and the changed conversation around sex, she challenged the international
community to make the absence of consent a new global standard for the
definition of rape.
Australian panelists from Our Watch presented a detailed programme
they have developed for reducing VAW, premised on the argument that gender
inequality sets the necessary context for violence against women. Features of
this context are: condoning of violence against women, men’s control over
decision-making and limits to women’s independence, stereotyped constructions
of masculinity and femininity, disrespect towards women and male peer relations
that emphasize aggression. So, the actions which would reverse that would
involve challenging these norms and values, and strengthening positive
relationships within society. They have developed a framework for monitoring
and evaluating progress on prevention actions. The Our Watch approach is both ambitious and comprehensive.
Yet activists from the region’s
less wealthy countries have to contend with dysfunctional criminal justice and
governance mechanisms, and weak data gathering capacities. They commented it
would be difficult to apply this approach in their respective countries.
Musawah, a Malaysian based
research and advocacy organization working towards equality and justice in the
Muslim family, announced a global drive to reform family laws. Inviting people
from all religions to join in, they called for transformative action to redraw
power relations within the family. They cited a lack of progress since Beijing 1995 in legal reform so critical to improving women’s status in all societies,
not only Muslim ones.
Musawah panelists based their
arguments on the recent work of feminist scholars Mala Htun,
Francesca Jensenius and Jami Nelson-Nunez, who reviewed global datasets and
found that family law is the single biggest predictor of women’s economic
empowerment, even more so than egalitarian labour laws and parental leave. They
discovered discrimination in family laws is significantly associated with
female labor force participation, ownership of assets, and ownership of bank
accounts.
Musawah panelists argued that
family law is uniquely resistant to reform, despite or perhaps because it is so
vital to accelerating progress for gender equality. In most countries, family
laws are deeply tied to religious and cultural identities, and, in fact,
personal status laws are exempt from guarantees of equality and
non-discrimination. But, without equality in the family, equality in the public
domain is not achievable.
Their own research found that,
although all countries claim to use the same sources, where Muslim family law
is codified no two countries have done so in the same way. Musawah has
identified 12 principal issues
of concern. Some address legislative frameworks, such as divorce rights,
inheritance, and child custody. Others are procedural, for example, polygamy,
VAW within the family, and guardianship of children. The third category addresses practices, for instance, capacity of women to enter into marriage, and child
marriage.
All these issues of concern require an examination of existing laws and unpacking how male dominance is built into the
frameworks of legal and social practice. Musawah’s approach is premised on the
argument that human rights and religion are not incompatible, and a feminist
interpretation of religious doctrine – in any scripture – will eventually enable
reforms in family law. Many younger feminist delegates from Indonesia,
Maldives, Pakistan, India and Malaysia, thought it may be a strategic way to
counter the growing global influence of the religious right. However, for the
older generation of secular feminists, including myself, a uniform civil code
based on a human rights framework may seem more difficult to achieve but
ultimately serves women’s interests best.
It is perhaps indicative of the
direction in which international feminism has gone since Beijing 1995 that
there was little focus at the CSO Forum on the Platform for Action’s
commitments to development and peace. Activists regretted that with the advent
of first the Millenium Development Goals and then the Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs), the international community considers it adequate to subsume the
feminist agenda within SDG Goal 5,
replacing a critique of patriarchy with a discourse of empowerment instead. In
their joint statement, they urged governments represented at the Ministerial Conference
to: ensure the primacy of human rights in economic, trade, and legal
frameworks; invest in social protection and health care for all; examine the
implications of the digital economy for women; and strengthen national
frameworks on gender and disability inclusion.
The Declaration of the Ministerial Conference acknowledged activists’ concerns without explicitly framing their statement in
human rights language. Instead, the ministers recognized women’s economic
contribution and called for measures to include them in the benefits of
development and protect them more effectively from poverty and inequality.
Avoiding the language of rights, patriarchy and feminism altogether, they “committed
to work together with key stakeholders to transform negative gender norms,
discriminatory social attitudes and to eliminate structurally unequal power
relations that persist between women and men.” The Declaration will be heard as
part of the global review of Beijing at the Commission on the Status of Women
in New York next March. Surely many attending will have heard these words
somewhere before, maybe in Beijing.
