CSW revitalization
history and futures project
statement presented to the CSW revitalization consultations
May 15
Submitted by
Soon-Young Yoon
Founder and co-director
Thank you to the co-facilitators and delegates for very informative discussions and for welcoming NGO comments. At the heart of our NGOs’ problem is a valuable return for investments. I once calculated that NGOs spent nearly $5,000,000 annually into the CSW–with an average of 5000 NGOs at the cost of $1000 each.
The question is: are we getting our money’s worth?
Dubravka Simonovic, former chair of the CSW and CEDAW committee believes that the commission has lost is credibility to implement human rights and policy instruments. As former chair of the NGO CSW/New York, I agree that the CSW’s reputation as the leading normative voice for gender equality and women’s empowerment is in peril. How and why has the CSW lost its way? One reason is that its review process with priority themes separates the BPfA’s 12 critical areas of concern into siloes, losing the holistic framework it needs to be a strong policy guide and hampering its potential to align with the 2030 agenda. But the CSW’s greatest error is to lock out NGOs out of negotiations –these very NGOs who have the reach and political will to bring the UN resolutions to life at home.
What can we do?
- CSW must bring CEDAW home. CSW created CEDAW as the accountability mechanism. We support the cost-effective proposal by the Vice-Chair of the CEDAW committee to hold its February session every year in New York. This will allow experts to be actively involved in the CSW with member states as well as NGOs. This will also strengthen the committee’s ability to align itself with CSW outcomes.
- The reporting guidelines should also be revised. The UN Women document for this suggests that governments report on how the BPfA aligns with the SDG but only a fleeting reference toCEDAW. If this is strengthened, it creates synergy without new mechanisms for accountability or duplication.
- I was one of the organizers of the NGO Forum in Beijing, responsible for the NGO amendments to the official document. At that time, NGOs were allowed into the negotiations as observers. We respected the intergovernmental mandate but were able to establish an official tie between the NGO Forum and the official meeting. The occasional spot on panels is great, but that does not create allies. The NGO Regional caucuses across the street can select 2 observers to attend negotiations, beyond the first reading and these caucuses become advocates for the Political Declaration.
- The winning CSW toolkit brings 3 elements together. The BPfA is a policy document but has no targets. These are found in SDG5, but potentially in all others. Indeed, many emerging issues are coming from the 2030 agenda.The hard punch is localizing these with CEDAW as we aspire to do in our US Cities for CEDAW campaign which now covers 62 cities, counties and states and more than 80 million Americans. And it is not true that human rights is just one of the 12 critical areas of concern. Human rights appears more than 500 times throughout the document, reflecting the momentum from the 1993 Vienna Human Rights conference. (Show chart)
- What you see of the NGOs in the UN hallways is a fraction of our power. During COVID, the NGO CSW/NY convened more than 30,000 virtual participants. At CSW69 we held 750 parallel events.
- Can the CSW tap this energy and become the creative leader at the UN to address the crises of our times through gender equality and women’s empowerment? I ask, if not the CSW, then who?