Beyond Cairo: Reproductive Rights and Culture

Amsterdam

Good morning.

I hope you are all rested, both from travel and from our surprise culinary activity of last night. It was a wonderful idea. It was not only a very welcome ice-breaker, which is critical to good dialogue, but it was also an “equalizer” – Prime Ministers, Ministers, government officials, non-governmental organization (NGO) leaders and activists, staff of UNFPA, along with our colleagues from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs/Development Cooperation were all equal cooks! That is more than an ice-breaker; it is the very quality we are trying to ensure in the dialogue that will follow – equality in our voices and expressions with full respect for our diversity. So thank you, Madam Minister, for the opportunity to begin our dialogue on the right track.

We also thank you, and, through you, the Dutch Government and your staff, for their generous hospitality and hard work in putting this meeting together. It has not been easy for staff, but they made it happen and, hopefully, with great success by the end of the meeting tomorrow.

I would like to begin by saying, “Happy International Women’s Day” to all the women and men in this room. We would not have a happy day if both women and men did not work together to build a common understanding of human rights and to work with each other to practise what we understand. It would not be a happy day if only women are empowered with the knowledge of what human rights mean to them. It would not be a happy day if men are left behind without learning what human rights mean for women as individuals, and for their communities and societies in general. It would not be a happy day if women were able to grow and develop new thinking and behaviour while men are still imprisoned in the same kind of thinking and behaviour. Enjoyment of human rights, in general, and for women in particular, requires behavioural change in the thinking and attitudes of men, the very keepers of the power structures in society. When this happens, then we can truly celebrate not a happy, but a joyous Women’s Day, not once a year, but every day of the year. Meanwhile, we still have a long way to go.

It is important for women to know their human rights; it is important to have laws put in place; it is important to have women activists, but those are not sufficient. It can only be sufficient when men also gain the same understanding of women’s human rights and when they change their own behaviour and attitudes to be in line with the spirit and word of women’s rights. Only then shall we experience the true and full implementation of these rights. We will be able to say that women have succeeded when men do not justify violations of women’s human rights on the basis of culture, but when they recognize them as true violations that require them to support women in confronting and ending them.

Minister Agnes van Ardenne eloquently expressed our thinking about this conference. She touched on what we want to see, what spirit is to dominate and what kind of thinking is required – “thinking outside the box”. She is right. To think of the relationship between reproductive rights and culture, we MUST think outside the box; we must dare our own selves to examine our own thinking, behaviour, attitudes, approaches, dogmas and biases, so that we can think outside the box. If we cannot do that together, then we should not expect that to happen with others outside this room, in societies at large and in the communities we serve.

We MUST think of women and men throughout their life cycle – as adolescents, young people, middle-aged and older persons. We must think of women, men, adolescents and youth not in the abstract, but in real human terms; we need to imagine them in their own context, their own relationships and networks, their own systems, institutions and power structures. We need to think of them not only as victims of violations of human rights, but also as implementers of human rights in their own complex contexts and interactions.

We need to ask ourselves – what do we need to make the principles of human rights alive, meaningful and empowering at all levels of the society, from the individual woman to the community at large? We have been doing advocacy and human rights education for many years and we do have success stories; yet violations of basic human rights – for example, the very right of women not to die while giving birth – persist in many parts of the world. Another example is poverty, which is a violation of a basic human right, and it has become more pervasive, in spite of all our advocacy and efforts to “eradicate” or “reduce” poverty.

My friends, the human rights discourse is not sufficient as long as women are marginalized from the processes and mechanisms that define and defend values and norms, and these are the religious and normative and/or traditional and indigenous institutions of their societies. Mobilizing women to challenge the status quo is important, but it is not sufficient. Those who hold the keys to power and their institutions, who are capable of bringing about change, must be addressed and persuaded to speak out on these issues with conviction. They are well-established in their communities, have their own communication channels and networks, have resources and are influential. We all need to work at the grass-roots level, but the “holders of the power” also deserve our attention both at the community as well as the national levels. How to do that varies from one context to another and each dialogue would vary as well.

Accountability for the implementation of human rights is that of the State. It is responsible for protecting the rights of all citizens – women, men, young people and children. It goes beyond adopting legislations and includes implementation, monitoring and accountability. We should provide assistance to States on how to go about not just putting systems in place, but also approaches to changing thinking, behaviours and attitudes that harm women and violate their rights in the diverse structures of the State.

We are commemorating the tenth anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). We have to assess what we have been doing for the past 10 years, since the Programme of Action was adopted in Cairo in 1994. We know that much progress has taken place, especially in terms of laws and legislation. But we also know that many tragedies and many daily violations of women’s human rights are still taking place. We have to ask ourselves: what do we have to do differently to reach some of the goals already set by the ICPD and the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, in other words, in the next 10 years? What do we have to do to continue supporting the empowerment of women to challenge not only what violates their rights, but also to create an enabling environment to promote change in the basic norms and institutions of society? What do we need to do to move forward from human rights education, which conveys human rights principles and expands awareness, to actually operationalizing human rights in simple, pragmatic and culturally sensitive approaches in the various diverse contexts in which women live? In other words, what do we have to do to move from talking about entitlements to addressing the requirements of the process of realizing these rights? We need to look at the gap between awareness and action, and work to bridge that gap.

We all know that human rights cannot just be transplanted as external principles into individuals or their communities. Human rights principles must be internalized by each individual woman and man, and must be absorbed and expressed in their own ways and within the positive aspects of their cultural values and beliefs. In order for this to happen, women must believe in human rights and must believe that these rights will protect them and not expose them in a battle against the society. They do weigh the social costs of entering conflict, as opposed to the benefits they gain from the status quo. Women will claim their rights if they know there is a support system that will protect them against any negative reaction from their own communities. This support system should certainly include some of those who hold the keys to the power structures – religious, community and traditional leaders.

I am raising these questions to demonstrate that operationalizing human rights is more easily said than done. It is a complex concept that goes into the depth of the human mind, heart and soul. It requires a creative, but more importantly, a non-dogmatic understanding of what it all means, in terms of the every day lives of millions of women who are already outside the power systems of their societies. I believe Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An’Naim, who is with us in this important dialogue, said it more eloquently in one of his remarks in the Forum on Religious and Cultural Rights in 1995: “There is a mistaken impression that all we need to have is a rights paradigm or a system of rights. The issue is not simply a question of rights; it is a question of ability to use rights, to the extent that rights can make any difference anyway. Beyond legal and rights paradigms, there is a whole world of women and men and social, cultural, and religious activities, which are deeply rooted and very inaccessible.”

Our purpose here is to begin concrete, productive and creative dialogue on how we can access the deeply rooted social, cultural and religious activities of women and men, in order to internalize human rights and make them the everyday paradigm of all. This is the challenge we are all facing as we begin our new decade in the implementation of the ICPD Programme of Action, and as we face a changing global environment in which some would like to go back on international agreements that provide a framework for win-win human rights actions, not only for women, but also for the society as a whole.

Friends, ladies and gentlemen,

I have agonized over this statement because I knew I would be facing a diverse audience. There are those who are on the same wavelength with me; others who are afraid of my thinking or of having my views misinterpreted, and yet others who are willing to give it a hearing. In response to the many silent and spoken questions and queries that I hear on a regular basis whenever I talk about culture, I would like to send the following messages:

• Human rights are the framework for our work and the basis for the ICPD Programme of Action. We are all accountable for its implementation in the most effective and efficient way in a human-centred approach.
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is very pertinent. Just as important are the Declaration on the Right to Development, and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This is a complete agenda and the three declarations go hand in hand. They constitute the aspirations and visions of the North and South, developed and developing countries, and they should be seen as equally important to development, in general, and to attaining the Millennium Development Goals, in particular. They are a package and we cannot divorce one right from another.
• Women’s rights are human rights, and reproductive health and rights are human rights as well.
• Respecting human rights also means respecting diversity and seeing it as a source of strength and enrichment.

Madam Minister, ladies and gentlemen,

I believe this is the very first meeting where two senior officials, the Minister and myself, “dared” to use these two concepts in the same phrase: “reproductive rights and culture”. Both of us, as you see from our statements, are strong supporters of human rights and women’s rights, in particular. This is the real challenge that we are facing in this meeting. I hope that, through our common understanding at this conference, we can achieve a real change in our thinking, behaviour and attitudes towards culture, including religion. If I were to have a wish list, I would hope for:

• Change in our thinking and thus, our discourse, from just focusing on the constraints created by cultures, as often expressed in international documents, to respecting people’s cultures and focusing, instead, on specific practices that harm women and violate their rights;
• Change in our discourse from identifying the constraints created by cultures to identifying the positive power of cultures to bring about change, which, in turn, would ensure deliberations on the violation of human rights;
• Change in any discourse on religions as only allowing women, men and young people to die to discourse that is centred on the moral authority of religions to save the lives of women, men and young people;
• Change in our practice, from empowering women at the grass-roots level to fight for their rights alone to the alternative of empowering women and men at the grass-roots levels to understand, internalize and own human rights and, thus, join forces to assert the legitimacy of the human rights approach;
• Change in our practice, from neglecting the importance of behavioural change in men in the power structures, especially at the community level, to the alternative one of attaching importance to educating and, thus, changing the thinking and attitudes of men in such structures.

Now that I have poured out my soul to all of you in such an open forum, I hope that you will reciprocate by being just as frank and open as I have been, in exactly the same spirit that Madam Minister had called for in her statement. I would like to challenge us all to open our minds and hearts to what could be a really courageous, frank, open, honest and very constructive dialogue. All of us have biases, one way or another, and I hope that this discussion will allow us to put our biases aside and look into our experiences with critical minds and speak out to enrich each other and our operational programmes.

Madam Minister, I usually have a personal message in my public statements. So, when before the opening session, Sima Samar, Commissioner of Human Rights, Afghanistan, gave me a gift, a doll dressed traditional in Afghan attire, with a burqah that can be taken off, she reminded me of a personal story in my life. When I graduated from university in the United States, my father came to the graduation ceremony and we travelled home together to Jeddah. All the way home and through a stop-over of three days in Rome, my father agonized about what to do with me and the veil, which customarily covered the faces of women. When we reached Jeddah, we found many people waiting for us at the foot of the aeroplane’s stairs. My father waited until all the passengers had left and then we stood at the top of the aircraft’s stairs. Looking at all the men greeting us, he stood by me, with my uncovered face, took my hand with one of his and waved my Bachelor’s Degree high in the air with the other hand. He told me: “this shall be your honour now.” Since then, I have never worn the veil, nor has any woman in our family.

So, Madam Minister, I tell this story to demonstrate how a human rights-based understanding of culture and religious beliefs can empower and free women in our societies.

Thank you.