Women’s rights activists and right-wing groups face off at CSW

When Janet Ramatoulie Sallah-Njie, an African Commission special rapporteur on the rights of women in Africa, entered a room at a side event near the United Nations to speak about financing for safe abortion, she was pleasantly surprised to see a packed house. “Wow, that’s a lot of interest,” she remembers telling herself. However, she quickly realized not everyone in the room was interested in what she had to say. “I didn't realize that was the interest on the opposite side,” she recalled. After opening statements, many women, who she said appeared coordinated, started making statements and asking questions about protecting children’s lives and why the focus was not on prosecuting perpetrators of rape. The occurrence seemed orchestrated and not done to hold a dialogue, but rather to disrupt discussions, said Sallah-Njie, who is also a member of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights. “From their look and accent, these people were not African,” Sallah-Njie told Devex, “from the interventions, you could tell that they had no clue and they didn't understand the context in Africa, the challenges that women face in Africa, the challenges to health care provision in Africa.” She added that the line of questioning felt “condescending, patronizing, and disrespectful.” This incident is one of many at this year’s 68th session of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. Each year during the two-week meeting, delegates work and vote on an agreed-upon conclusion to set the agenda on women’s rights for the coming year. However, some women’s rights activists are concerned that negotiations will be harder this year than in previous years because of the increased sophistication and coordination of right-wing groups opposed to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. While event disruption by right-wing and religious groups is common and expected every year — or, as one delegate put it, “is the law of the land” at CSW — sources said they felt there was an increasingly coordinated effort to “infiltrate” side events and official negotiations. Given that the United Nations is composed of 193 different countries with different values, many of them conservative, some nations are happy to join forces with ideological allies and present views that they feel are suppressed at CSW. During official negotiations, conservative countries join forces in the Group of Friends of the Family, which is made up of around 25 countries such as Russia and Qatar pushing against language around sexual reproductive and health rights, with an emphasis on the traditional family and more specifically making sure the word family is always singular, not plural, diplomats told Devex. For some women’s rights advocates, these groups don’t belong at CSW because they claim the groups' missions are in stark contrast with the commission’s mission to advance women’s rights globally. “Giving a platform, giving access and giving a voice and power to people who are actually trying to regress gender justice and women's rights issues, is a pitfall and it weakens the language [on] the key issues that we want to actually push the needle on,” Amina Hersi, head of gender rights and justice at Oxfam International, told Devex. These groups seem prepared to not only disrupt side events but also to shape the negotiated text to ensure more conservative language such as family values and motherhood are prioritized. A representative of a right-wing group, who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the issue, told Devex they feel like their voices are being silenced by CSW organizers, and whenever they would try to organize an event, they would get very early morning or late evening spots. This relegation pushed them to approach CSW differently this year by, among other things, organizing their own alternative conference. The representative added that organizers restrict what representatives can or cannot say during meetings. “They called it guidelines that they require all the NGOs that participate in that forum which favors organizations they agree with.” A value and policy guideline for nongovernment organizations at CSW states, for example, that representatives should “respect the diversity of languages, opinions and expertise, while acknowledging that sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, transphobia, global North domination and other institutionalized forms of oppression exist.” The negotiations started earlier this year, and like-minded countries already expressed their opposition to language around sexual and reproductive health rights and more gender-inclusive language. This strategy is nothing new, but a new alternative conference organized by right-wing groups could indicate more organized lobbying this year than in previous ones. A new side conference One way this advocacy has changed is through the organization of a summit on the margins of CSW, called the Conference on the State of Women and Family. The two-day event took place from March 13 to 14 and was in part hosted at the Nigerian mission to the U.N. "It came about because there were a large number of organizations that felt like we were not getting the opportunity to express our positions on issues and to do parallel events where they could actually be heard," the organizer, who wished to remain anonymous, told Devex. The conference was spearheaded by Family Watch International and other like-minded groups. Family Watch International is a fundamentalist Christian nonprofit that describes itself as working “to protect and promote the family as the fundamental unit of society at the international, national and local level through education, pro-family advocacy, and family-based humanitarian aid.” The Southern Poverty Law Center counters that the organization “promotes anti-LGBT pseudoscience that includes the falsehood that homosexuality is a mental disorder derived from childhood trauma, and that so-called ‘conversion therapy’ can effectively eliminate same-sex attraction.” The group was recently associated with driving an anti-LGBTQ+ agenda in Africa, including a recent anti-homosexual act in Uganda, although it denies lobbying for the law. The U.S.-based advocacy group Center for Family and Human Rights, or C-fam, called the Conference on the State of Women and Family a “counter” event that gives a voice to “silenced pro-lifers.” Other organizations represented at the conference included The Heritage Foundation, United Families International, and Campaign Life Coalition. Jeanne Hefez, a senior policy and adviser at Ipas, an organization working to ensure access to abortion internationally, has been observing how these groups operate in the international arena for years. For her, the parallel conference shows they’re being more intentional about strategic alliance-building. For the organizer, the meeting was simply an opportunity to present alternative points of view: “We would like to add to the conversation, to provide an opportunity to expand to discuss these topics without feeling like we are somehow walking on toes or being a little bit pushed to the side,” the organizer said. “Giving a voice and power to people who are actually trying to regress gender justice and women's rights issues … weakens the language [on] the key issues that we want to actually push the needle on.” --— Amina Hersi, head of gender rights and justice, Oxfam International Family Watch International’s president, Sharon Slater, kicked off the conference. Slater is a controversial figure in the feminist world, as a lot of her advocacy centers around denying LGBTQ+ identity and denouncing sexual education. Her speech criticized the work of several U.N. bodies such as the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the U.N. Population Fund, mostly in areas of sexual education. She also called for groups to lobby for language around family values and to emphasize states’ sovereignty instead of responsibility when it comes to implementing the agreed conclusion of the U.N. text. Slater did not respond to a request for an interview. A controversial event Slater was also given center stage at an event celebrating the “year of the family,” organized by the Organization for Islamic Cooperation last Monday. The event featured diplomats from Egypt, Turkey, Burkina Faso, Tajikistan, and Indonesia, as well as the UN Women’s regional director for the Arab states region, Susanne Mikhail. Slater’s collaboration with the OIC was not surprising for Ipas’ Hefez, as Family Watch signed a memorandum of understanding with the OIC in 2022. Still, Hefez — along with other diplomats and activists Devex spoke to — said it was shocking for her to see Slater share the stage with a U.N. representative. “It shows an alarming normalization and mainstreaming of this organization,” she said. UN Women, in a written statement about the event, said that “UN Women, through the participation of our Regional Director for the Arab States Region, set out critical messages from the UN Secretary General’s report on the priority theme in this year’s CSW, including those related to multiple, intersecting forms of discrimination that intensify women’s and girls’ poverty and lock women and girls in a vicious cycle of inequality, economic deprivation, and violence.” Another delegate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said UN Women often has to navigate a difficult political balancing act as it tries to deal with more religiously and politically conservative countries. Part of it involves engaging with organizations that the delegate said are contrary to UN Women’s mandate, which is dedicated to promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women. One Western diplomat told Devex they considered being more active in pushing back against right-wing groups, but they also feared doing so would give them more legitimacy. Activists attending CSW also said they worry about the declining space for women’s rights, with many countries electing right-wing governments that oppose abortion, among other issues. For Commissioner Sallah-Njie, these trends tend to have a domino effect in her continent. “Trends in the West, especially America, are not helping the rest of the world," she said. Still, while she was surprised by the questions and the disruption at her event, she hopes her work at this year’s meeting will have some impact — even on the women she does not agree with. At her event, even if she did not necessarily agree with the line of questioning or the intent behind it, she said she and other panelists still took time to answer the questions the best way they could. “I just hope that they will leave the meeting more educated than they arrived,” she said.