The NGO Commission on the Legal and Social Status of Women (NGO/CSW) rejected requests from right-to-life and natural family advocacy groups to hold side events during the upcoming summit.
In a letter addressed to Sima Bahous, executive director of UN Women, more than 400 organizations from Africa, Asia, Australia, Central America, the Caribbean and Europe called on UN officials “to ensure that organizations like ours are not discriminated against in the debates.”
The letter was also sent to the UN Secretary-General, the diplomatic office in charge of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, and was widely shared among UN delegations.
“It is completely unacceptable that a UN body or its representatives, such as the NGO Commission on CSW, would seek to override and silence an entire sector of civil society,” the letter reads. “We ask you to do everything in your power to ensure that UN Women and the NGO Commission on the Status of Women retain the Commission on the Status of Women in the status of an open forum for respectful and frank debate on the issues of most concern.”
The organizations whose events were rejected were in fact told that their values “do not correspond” to the principles of the NGO Commission for the CSW without explaining what these principles consist of. The official statutes and manuals of the committee do not define them, nor do they establish conditions for holding events.
An entire world discriminated against
The participation of non-governmental organizations in United Nations debates has been a constant since the founding of the Organization itself. According to the regulations of the United Nations itself, NGOs authorized to participate in debates can be blocked only in extreme cases of political attacks on member states and their links to criminal activities.
The NGO Commission for CSW helps coordinate and organize the events that take place in conjunction with the Intergovernmental Conference at UN Headquarters. The events organized and hosted by the Commission are part of the work of the official UN conference itself and are attended by both government delegates and NGO representatives. For the past two years, events related to the annual United Nations Conference on the Status of Women have been held in virtual form due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
As usual the longa manus of Soros
For a long time, the NGO Commission on the Status of Women was a comparison of opinions, including those of pro-life and pro-family organizations, but in recent years the wind has shifted, discriminating in an explicitly selective way.
The refusal to admit pro-life and family advocacy groups is in fact not an isolated event. The United Nations Population Fund also excluded them from the Nairobi summit in 2019.
Progressive groups, including groups linked to tycoon George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, are openly calling for such organizations to be banned from UN debates altogether and for their ECOSOC status to be revoked, labeling them “anti-rights”. A coalition of pro-abortion and LGBT+ “rights” groups revived these appeals last month during a consultation with non-governmental organizations about the possibility of their participation in the annual United Nations Conference on Women, organized by the Permanent Missions of Denmark and Costa Rica.
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