Every one of the hundreds and hundreds of women who are here at the CSW is trying to build a ‘common understanding', by accurately describing the daily lived reality in their country or region. For some, it's a matter of just one word that makes all the difference to this task they have set themselves.
Afaf Jabiri who is from Jordan is here with ‘Roa' meaning Vision. She says "The theme of this year's CSW is 'the equal sharing of responsibility of men and women' and we are here to say that as long as there is occupation in our region, the inequality will be maintained. There will be no solutions for women, because while women are under occupation, whenever they want to work on their rights they can't, because they have to work on their priorities of getting food and getting their kids released from jail and all of these things. So we have this big challenge, and we really need to network on it together and lobby for our issues"
Two years ago it was agreed that there would be annual report to the UN on the situation of Palestinian women, and there will be a resolution passed this year. "The report this year doesn't include the word occupation, so it doesn't reflect the situation there and the suffering of the Palestinian women caused by the occupation". So far it doesn't even mention the word ‘occupation'. Our goal is to get the word occupation into the Agreed Conclusions from the CSW and into the resolution.
The women from ROA are also using the CSW as a vehicle to get to the UN General Assembly. "We are meeting with government delegates from different countries - Cuba, Syria, Chile, India, and Kyrgyzstan - and we are trying to tell them why it's important. We are also meeting with the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and the head of the Division for the Advancement of Women (UNDAW)"
"It makes a difference at different levels. At a personal level, I feel when I talk to people who know nothing about our issues that at least it is a way to build solidarity, so we met with the Africa coalition of women, the Asia Coalition of women, the Asia Pacific Coalition. All of these women know about our issues, but we didn't have that common understanding which we can build on. This year we have achieved this, and we are trying to build a cross-region network of women who are living under occupation".
"I feel that every year I learn, I advocate for our issues, and if we get our statement with the word ‘occupation' into the Agreed Conclusions, then for every body, I will feel that at least we have done something".
Caroline Lambert works for the Women's International Development Agency in Australia, and is here with Asia Pacific Women's Watch. She too, is working on the issue of language and negotiating word by word as the CSW moves to finalise the Agreed Conclusion for 2009.
Caroline says, "This is the only global platform that links international policy to the grassroots work that I do. My particular specialisation is language, so I work hard in the second week of CSW trying to get key words into the language of the Agreed Conclusions, because the language impacts strongly on women across the world. In the Asia Pacific region where I come from, the conservative position for the past five years has meant that the language has been one of maintaining rather than advancing women's rights. For example there's been a lot of advocacy work by women on reproductive and sexual rights, and in countries where women are dying every minute because they are not getting the services they need, we are trying to get the states to provide the services. There was a push by one nation state to change ‘services' to ‘care' which implies the government should provide, rather than have reproductive and sexual rights as a right. So often the language is moved from a rights based position to a more patronising one, in which the government has more control over the issue. So language can be crucial".
