There are more participants than ever before - nearly 9000 - at this year's UN Commission on the Status of Women. It’s a big year for CSW, in theory. It's the 20th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, and a global progress review against the goals set out in that pivotal outcome document, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.
There has already been much said about the disappointing dearth of real debate on this important anniversary - this year’s CSW Declaration a far cry from Beijing’s, having been “pre-negotiated” before the thousands of feminist activists arrived in New York to begin advocacy on said outcomes.
Ostensibly, this was to protect space to draft truly progressive language that, it was thought, would not be possible in the hustle of CSW. But the bland document the community has inherited leaves much room for improvement. Indeed, as Zohra Moosa describes in yesterday's article on openDemocracy 50.50, it has been decried as such by nearly 1,000 organizations around the world.
