Abstract
The UN has been widely engaged in the issue of the advancement of women, although this has resulted more from the activities of the latter than those of the organization. This is not surprising since international political action highlighting the grievances of women has jarred systems of control integral to state authority. Articulating these grievances has also unsettled existing male-dominated diplomatic discourse within and beyond the UN. This response was graphically epitomized in 1995 when the Chinese government decided to locate the Non-Governmental Women’s Forum at a distance of sixty kilometers from the official Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW). This irritated NGO delegations as much for its diversion of news media attention from the substantive questions they had arrived to discuss as for the inconvenience caused.1
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Cited by Lincoln Kaye, ‘To Bear any Burden’, Far Eastern Economic Review 7 September 1995, 43.
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Salbiah Ahmad, ‘Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, An Asia Pacific Campaign: Implementation and Accountability’, Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD), Forum News 8, 2 (1995), 8.
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Amnesty International, Women’s Rights and Human Rights: Commitments made by Governments in the Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action (London: AI, 1995). On relevant UN Human Rights Commission activities, see UN Doc. A/Conf. 177/9.
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Pramilla Senanayake, ‘Women: the Neglected Factor in Sustainable Development’, in Bryan Cartledge (ed.), Population and the Environment (Oxford: OUP, 1995), 128. On ‘mainstreaming’ in the UN, see Implementation of the Outcome of FWCW, Report of the Secretary General UN Doc. A/51/322 (September 1996), 5–8.
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© 1998 Roderic Alley
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Alley, R. (1998). The UN and the Advancement of Women. In: The United Nations in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26825-2_7
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