Report by Jan Logie of the YWCA of Aotearoa/New Zealand

At the conference opening there was a fairly generalised concern with the international process to date, but there was also a lot of energy for working to build on the achievements so far.

One of the key instruments for NGO representatives to monitor the negotiations was the daily meetings of the NGO Linkage Caucus.

The meetings provided a review of the contact group activities and the progress of the document as a whole. Regional and special interest caucuses gave reports and there was discussion, albeit limited, on other topical concerns.

Linkage Caucus was also a good place for organising: petitions were passed around, protest times and lobbying strategies shared and connections made.

The tone of the meeting reflected the politics of WEDO-supportive groups rather than the conservative NGOs present at the special session.

The panel on armed conflict, attended on behalf of New Zealand by Martha Coleman, covered Afghanistan, East Timor, Bougainville, North East India, and West Papua. Question time further covered the situations in Uganda, Fiji, and Bhutan.

I found particularly salient and disturbing the plight of war refugees who are covered by two relevant sets of international standards and yet lose their rights as citizens. The almost tautological and far too obvious point that the arms market is a source of conflict between nations was also well made.

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I was also interested in the discussion of the way the theft of resources through the ongoing process of colonisation has led to increased armed conflict led by indigenous people. Some reports pointed out that ignoring gender issues in aid and peace-building work results in some spectacular screw-ups.

The Health Caucus was strongly focused on the special session negotiations and was attended by a number of women of a conservative religious position. The alliance between Cuba and the Holy See on sexual rights issues was a concern to some in the caucus, as was the slow progress and amount of effort going into holding the language from the Beijing Platform for Action.

The Lesbian Caucus meetings, involving women from South Africa, Albania, Guatemala, Australia, the US and Western Europe, focused on the progress of the special session negotiations and provided an opportunity to swap stories and to organise lobbying around the language of diversity, sexual rights and of course sexual orientation. The caucus also held a press conference, the first alongside any UN meeting. The press conference was full to capacity and while the caucus did not get the sexual orientation language it was lobbying for, the debates and negotiations were more open and a strong feeling of progress persisted.

The Youth Caucus presented an intergenerational roundtable on education, but it provided only a low level discussion as there were too many speakers for the time available.

The PDHRE (People's Decade for Human Rights Education) prepared a day-long CEDAW training session to introduce human rights educators to a specific CEDAW training package. The day revolved around group work testing the package and exploring the applicability to our own country environments.

It was an incredible experience to sit in a group of politically active women from Nigeria, Kosovo, Guyana, Korea, Bahamas, Jordan, Northern Ireland, and Afghanistan, discussing the respective progress and challenges facing us. Our situations were extremely varied and it was helpful for the facilitator to note that putting human rights abuses on a continuum of more or less abusive missed the point of a right.

The training package has definite potential as a local/global women's human rights education instrument. Although I believe the programme may be best used here in snippets, I am happy to copy the video and work book at cost for anyone interested in looking it over.

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The Youth Caucus panel on the World Bank and development work as supported and funded by the World Bank and IMF (International Monetary Fund) covered a key area of concern for young women. The effects of structural adjustment and other similar programmes have disproportionately impacted on the lives of young women.

Young people currently account for the majority of people in this world and yet they are rarely consulted in the development of any development programmes and their views and protests at Seattle were ridiculed.

There is a need to challenge the perception that the work of the World Bank, IMF and UN only concerns adults, as this reinforces the gap between the intention of poverty reduction and the ability to achieve this goal. The World Bank is reviewing its processes and feedback is welcome through their website. Their focus is currently on health and education in areas with the highest poverty and widest gender gap.

I was quite intrigued that the speaker from the World Bank differentiated between good and bad privatisation and offered an education voucher system and a "Tomorrow's Schools"-type scheme as examples of good privatisation.

One of the last panels I attended was on sexual harassment, which the Human Rights Commission has already reported on. I found the explanation of gender-based harassment, which views harassment in broader non-sexualised terms, important. It encompasses actions that: denigrate women's performance, provide patronising assistance, withhold training or information, allow deliberate sabotage, isolate women from support networks and assign tasks according to gender stereotypes, as well as the more obvious taunting and physical assault.

The idea of women as sensitive to concerns of harassment (and potentially litigious) was also discussed. These ideas have resulted in some women being excluded from important social networking systems and having their work further regulated. This is also a form of gender-based harassment. A clear statement of unacceptable behaviour excludes much argument along these lines.

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