FYI.
----- Original Message -----
From: Christina Ryan
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Friday, July 16, 2010 11:43 PM
Subject: [wwda-discuss] Day 4 in New York at CEDAW
Dear WWDA women
Day 4 - Thursday 16 July
A very long day and not as productive as we would have liked.
The big plus was that I had my first full night of sleep for about 5 days so I was fresh and ready to roll. We had arranged to gather at 9.30 in the lobby of the conference centre where the Committee is in session. My new security arrangements worked okay, although frankly the UN really doesn't seem to be aware of how to manage with wheelchairs in the building. Clearly people using chairs only come as visitors not to work; otherwise the security would be less ridiculous. To get to the conference centre I have to go back out into the street after doing the security check. Now anything could happen in the street, although it won't with me, but how do they know that?
Meeting at 9.30 was the first time all 7 of us had actually met as a delegation. Half of us had never seen each other before even though we have been talking on the phone for months, and in some cases we have been working together via phone and email for 6 or 7 years. So, it's terrific to finally all see what we look like and get down to work.
Our aim for the day was to finalise the lobbying sheets and get our statement underway. Well made plans can go awry! We started with observing Russia giving its country report and made the mistake of sitting in front on the Russian NGO women, so we felt rude leaving after only half an hour as planned and ended up staying for almost 2 hours. This really threw a spanner in the works of our day and meant that we wasted a lot of productive time. Stupid really, but we still found the Russian report fascinating. Clearly they have a long way to go on women's rights, and the Committee weren't very impressed by some of the "traditional" ways that women were viewed.
Finally we got upstairs to the cafeteria for a cup of tea and some work at 12.30. We started by identifying the top 12 issues for our delegation. As our delegation has been selected by an open and rigorous selection process we are able to act fairly independently as representatives of our various groups. So, as long as we stick to our Shadow Report and work within the accepted framework we can make decisions on the spot about what include and emphasise.
I'm very lucky to have a well prepared WWDA behind me so knowing what issues to push isn't hard for me and my real role here is to ensure that the voice of women with disabilities stays in the mix. I do know that if we hadn't had someone here then some of our critical issues would have slipped off the list, so it is important to be here and make sure that we are heard.
The big issues for WWDA are violence (which includes sterilisation, access to violence support services), parenting and the right to parent, data collection disaggregated by gender and disability, the disparity in service provision between women and me with disabilities, and health/reproductive rights (coerced abortion, menstrual suppression, access to health services). This isn't how the list looked when we left, but the key issues are still represented in the broader mix that we must come up with to ensure we don't drop off completely.
Our Shadow Report has been written against the various articles of CEDAW. This is the way the Committee looked at it last time and we had prepared something different, so we feel prepared and have arranged our lobbying sheets to support this.
Yesterday we discover that this isn't the process now. Although the Committee works through each article during a country report they tend to look at the cross cutting issues. So, if we had used the model we used last time we would have been more on target. Our first delegation discussion around priority issues is about reframing our existing work against the issues, rather than the articles.
We end up with 14 priority issues, including women with disabilities, CALD, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women as headings amongst others like violence, representation and participation, reproductive health, etc. The reason for having 3 headings to cover our minority population groups is to ensure the Committee gets the best potential for considering the critical issues against each of these in addition to them appearing under the other subject headings.
I spend the rest of the day drafting a paragraph about women with disabilities. This isn't as easy as it sounds. We are drafting paragraphs against each priority issue in a format that the Committee could use as its Concluding Comments. Of course it will be up to them whether they are used or not, but at least we are giving them as much preparation and support as we can. We focus on general inclusion and participation for the 3 minority group paragraphs.
Late in the day several of our group go across to the UN building to catch the end day debrief and see what has happened behind the scenes that we need to know about. We discover that both Friday and Monday will be closed sessions, so our capacity to lobby individual Committee members will be zero. This is a real blow to our game plan and we have to do a major rethink.
We also discover that we must submit our lobbying and priority sheets to the Secretariat on Friday, with an index page; we are not allowed to give Committee members anything directly. This is also a real blow as we are not prepared enough and will now need to work overtime Thursday night to be ready.
Our only real time with the Committee is during the lunch session on Monday, which we now discover will be about an hour. This is more than we were originally told, but it puts the pressure on to ensure we use this time very wisely. We must also prepare for Monday lunch robustly and not lose this valuable opportunity.
So, at abut 6.30 pm Thursday we realise that we have a long night ahead of us, and are also very aware that 3 of us, including me, are spending the next 3 days in training. We realise that doing the training the previous weekend would have made more sense, and also realise that we need the next 3 days to be mega prepared. Suddenly everything is tense and the group is already exhausted after a long day.
With nothing left to give I head home and am in bed an hour later. The other women all keep going and arrange to meet me before training in the morning to go over what has been achieved during the night.
Yesterday we practiced being flexible, today we had to really use that skill and it still wasn't as strong as it needed to be. It's like the rules change all the time so that no one can lobby effectively. I'm sure that isn't deliberate as the UN really does value the NGO contributions. It's more likely that systems have simply been adjusted over time to improve them and support the Committee better. Makes it really difficult when we only engage once every 4 years, rather than the constant awareness that others would have.
So, an early start Friday to catch up before training and another very hot day forecast.
cheers
Christina
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