Beijing and Beyond
Presentation at Asia Pacific Civil Society Forum on Beijing+20
14-16 November 2014, Bangkok,Thailand
Statement by Cai Yiping, DAWN
Dear colleagues and friends, good afternoon!
It is my great pleasure to take part in this Forum and to be with all of you who travelled from different parts of the Asia Pacific region. Thanks to the hard work of the steering committee members and the co-secretariat in the past two months, we finally get to see the faces behind the names and the hundreds of emails we exchanged to have 480 of us here today. So firstly, let’s celebrate this get-together!
Let’s also however not forget those who are not able to join us here today, feminists and human rights activists like Sunila Abeysekera, who dedicated all their lives for women’s human rights and social justice, those who do not have financial resources to pay for their travel and those who are not allowed to board an airplane and leave their countries because of the critical work they are doing. We know that all of you are with us here and now in spirit.
My topic today is “Beijing and Beyond”. What happened in Beijing about 20 years ago? And how it related to our lives and our activism today? And where are we going from here?
I was much younger 20 years ago when the 4th World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, China in 1995. I attended the Women’s NGO Forum held in Huairou as one of 5000 Chinese participants among 30,000 NGO participants from all around world. For quite some time, I was so naïve and thought the NGO Forum was equivalent to 4th World Conference on Women and that the Beijing Platform for Action was the outcome document of NGO forum. Do not laugh at me, because until now you may still find many other Chinese who share the same misperception. I was not totally wrong actually. The NGO forum is more well known than the official meeting in China and it opened many doors and windows for us to see a whole new world – it introduced new concepts, like NGO, gender perspective, feminist movement, “women’s rights are human rights”, and more, to the Chinese people and had a big impact on the Chinese women’s movement and on policy advocacy. The Beijing Platform for Action would have been a different document from what it is now without the NGO forum and the long struggle by the feminists and women’s human rights advocates all over the world.
This explains why it is important for us to devote time and energy and resources to get together here. We believe that we can make a difference and have a critical and progressive impact on the Asia Pacific regional outcome document on Beijing+20 by our presence; by our collaboration; by our collective strategising, and by showing our un-wearying commitment to move beyond Beijing. More importantly, we believe in the strength and power of the feminist movement to reshape the agenda that prioritize the wellbeing of people; that prioratise rights and equality, especially for women and girls and marginalized groups; that prioratise respect for the planet, over the interest and profit of capital and privileged groups.
The slogan of the Beijing Women’s NGO Forum was “look at the world from women’s eyes”. Twenty years after Beijing, it is now a fierce new world that we live in. It is particularly a fierce new world for women in the Asia Pacific region – the security, financial, economic and ecological crises, a backlash against advances towards social justice and human rights for all. This world is full of serious fractures, severe backlash, broken promises, and uncertain outcomes for the world’s women.
Twenty years ago the women of the world dreamt of many possibilities, which they enshrined in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. They identified 12 critical areas of concern and states promised strategic interventions to deal with these concerns. We know today however that much of these commitments have still to be implemented. Much of it is unfinished despite some progress. New and emerging concerns have also to be dealt with. Women now have sharpened eyes; eyes that are new; eyes that are young; to look at the 12 critical areas of concern afresh. Today we know that these are not stand-alone issues, all the critical areas of Beijing are interlinked. They cannot be dealt with in silos. They must continue to be framed in the context of women’s human rights.
We must now also identify the big gaps, the silence and inactions. Just to give you some examples. These include the rising and widening inequalities within the home, within countries, between countries and among different social groups, such as people with disabilities, people living and affected by HIV/AIDS, youth and adolescents, caste, ethnic and indigenous groups, people with different sexual orientation, gender identities and expression, migrants and sex workers, those displaced due to conflict and disaster, single women, and women growing older. (Well, we all fit into this category.) We have also to deal with rising extremism, fundamentalisms and militarization that give rise to increased violence, impunity, and discrimination.
The Beijing Platform for Action should be also looked at in the context of climate change and environmental inequalities that are besetting the Asia Pacific region, resulting in environmental catastrophes, which disproportionately affect the poor, especially women.
We must also not forget that Beijing was all about “equality, peace and development”. Beijing was also about realizing women’s human rights and substantive equality. 20 years later, we see unfortunately, the shift to a concentration on development narrative that instrumentalizes women, at the expense of their human rights. We are at a critical moment today with ongoing debates on the post 2015 development agenda and the articulation of sustainable development goals (SDGs). We must ensure that SDGs are firmly grounded in a human rights framework. We must ensure that in addition to the stand-alone gender equality goal, gender is cross cut in all the development goals and targets and that we have gender sensitive indicators and sufficient means of implementation to realize the SDGs.
We have also to express our concerns on the current formulation of the gender equality goal, which highlights women’s empowerment, but not women’s human rights. We are concerned that current targets while dealing with women’s access to resources, land and water for instance do not take into account women’s bodily integrity, sexual autonomy and self-determination. Failure to realise sexual and reproductive health and rights would continue to marginalize women in poverty, deprive them of economic empowerment, and ignore power imbalances that lead to violence and discrimination against women.
We must remember that while we were deliberating at Beijing 20 years ago, the WTO was also founded at the same time. We did not pay much attention to this critical institution at then. However the WTO has come to impact on our lives and the lives of all the peoples of this region in varied detrimental ways. We have to take this impact into account in our work today together with other financial infrastructure. We need therefore to critically reflect and re-look at our work that deals with many thematic areas such as women’s political participation, women’s economic empowerment, violence against women, migrant workers and so on. In this context we need to look at the Beijing Platform for Action and re-politicise it and make it relevant to current realities. We need to hold our States accountable to their promises of 20 years ago and bring back the feminist politics that underpinned the Beijing documents. We must make sure that States do not negate the gains we made and backtrack on them. We must also bear in mind that the accelerated implementation of the BPFA must be linked to Treaties that ensure state accountability and obligation such as CEDAW which are international, legally binding instruments that complement policy documents such as the BPFA.
Dear comrades, we are here not merely to chase the UN processes and their outcomes. We are here because we are part of a larger women’s rights movement and the feminist movement. Our ambitions are for enabling women’s human rights, for ensuring substantive equality and for guaranteeing gender, ecological, erotic and economic justice.
20 years after Beijing, we now have a younger generation of movement builders whose vision is bolder, whose strategy is diverse, whose activism is innovative, applying the new information communication technologies which was not available 20 years ago. The movement has a younger face in this forum.
I was once asked by a young Chinese feminist activist, “Who are the leaders of the feminist’ movement? Is there any leading figure or heroine that is the face of the movement, like other social movements?” I said, no, we cannot pin our fingers down on one or few names. We are the movement and we are the faces of the feminist movements. And every each of us in this room count!
Thank you!