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  What was unusual about the meeting is the attempt by organizers to forestall open negations on the "outcome" document that the conference will produce.

U.N. documents are generally negotiated by member states. In this meeting, the chairman insisted on the wording of the document without any negotiation. Not all governments went along.

The outcome document of the 49th CSW session will be important because CSW celebrating two of the most potent tools of international radical feminism, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action of the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, and the "Beijing +5" document of 2000.

Both of these documents have been used by the U.N. to promote abortion, as well as other aspects of the radical feminist agenda.

The Beijing documents are controversial and have never been fully accepted by many countries. However, the draft declaration unveiled this Wednesday states that countries unequivocally "reaffirm" these documents.

In U.N. parlance, this means that countries stamp their full approval on the entire text of these documents.

Of the 10 countries that spoke on Wednesday, only the United States stated that it might object to the reaffirmation of the Beijing documents.

China, Cuba, India, and Syria were among those who found the one-page document excellent for its "strength" and "brevity," and recommended adoption of the document without amendments.

Most troubling to conservatives, the declaration ties the Beijing documents to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), stating that the "full and effective implementation" of the Beijing documents is "essential" for achieving the MDGs. The eight MDGs are the UN's most recent major initiative. They were drafted by the U.N. as a means of implementing aspects of the Millennium Declaration, an aspirational and largely non-controversial list of ways in which countries resolved to improve the world in the new century.

The CSW declaration calls itself a "contribution" to the upcoming September review of progress on the MDGs.

Neither the Millennium Declaration nor the MDGs mention the Beijing documents, though they could have. However, the UN recently revealed its strategy of injecting radical feminist objectives into the MDGs. In a report from the U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), the UN states that "Beijing + 10 provides an opportunity to strengthen and focus the gender equality dimensions of efforts to achieve the MDGs" and that "Strong gender equality recommendations from Beijing + 10 and the Millennium Summit will be powerful tools for use at the national level to stimulate greater action on gender equality."

The CSW Bureau decided on Wednesday that because countries appeared to agree on the draft declaration, further informal negotiations were unnecessary, and any proposed changes should be submitted for the Bureau's consideration by Thursday afternoon.

Copyright 2005 - C-FAM (Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute)

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