Thursday chapel was the Salvation Army with the band and a wonderful
liturgical dancer. I think that there are pictures on the facebook page
United Nations Women Adventures. We were all dancing in the aisles and
definitely energized for the day.
The morning briefing was done by Jackie Shapiro, the former chair of
NGOCSW (nongovernment organization of the Commission on the Status of
Women) and Ambassador Gonsalves of El Salvador and Vice Chair of the
Commission.
There are 4 resolutions being debated as well as the Agreed Conclusions:
One on Palestine, one on Malawi, one on natural diasters and one on
HIV/AIDS. At 10 am tomorrow the Commission will adopt the resolutions
and then between 4 and 7 the plan to announce the Agreed Conclusions.
El Salvador has a program and budget to ensure inclusiveness in a public
services ie: they use radios to reach out to rural women and have set
up sites for "one stop shopping" for services including up to 32
services in one site.
The Ambassador explained that UN Women had held regional meetings prior
to the Commission for discussion of the issues in order to make
discussions less contentious in New York. He stated that some countries
had gone back on the agreements that were made at these regional
meetings and were no longer agreeing to previously agreed language
and were slowing down negotiations.
The next speaker was the head of Civil society for UN Women. the
negotiations on Wednesday went from 11 am to 12:45 am with brief meal breaks.
10 paragraphs were discussed and 60 are left. The Executive Director of
UN Women attended as did the Ministers of South Africa and Egypt which
helped to speed things up a bit. She described the vice chair as "heroic"
in her strong desire to move ahead. However "the crucial issue now is
time".
Immediately after the briefing we held a North America/Europe caucus
meeting. We discussed the upcoming meetings on women's issues. One member
brought up the legalities of some member states not following treaties
which they have signed and a discussion ensued on whether the caucus
could do anything about this. Finally it was decided to work on the
Agreed Conclusions by working with our missions and negotiators and
supporting them in any way we can. At the end of the meeting I was
honoured to be asked to consider becoming a co-coordinator of the caucus.
I asked for time to consider this.
At 4:00pm the core group of the SI (Soroptimist International) met in a
hotel room to have an opportunity to visit socially and to discuss the
latest reports from the negotiations. I met some pretty awesome women in
that group and I really enjoyed working with them.
At 6 pm we had an Ecumenical Women debrief at the Episcopal Church
centre. We watched the webinar of Christine Mangale delivering an verbal
"intervention" to the Commission as well as a young woman from the Working Group on Girls speaking. We discussed the lastest release from the
Commission. The day ended with packing because I am going home tomorrow
so that I can go to my daughter's surprise birthday party.
Blessings Judy
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