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UNFPA GLOBAL POPULATION POLICY UPDATE
Issue 34 - July 12 2003
On 29 and 30 June 2004, 300 ministers and senior officials from the
Latin American, Caribbean and partner nations attended the opening
session of the Ad Hoc Committee on Population and Development of the
Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). The
committee meeting was held during the 30th session of ECLAC in San Juan,
Puerto Rico, in observance of the 10th anniversary of the 1994 Cairo
International Conference on Population and Development.
Below is a statement read by a Member of Parliament from Nicaragua,
Representative Emilia Torres, during the meeting on behalf of 22
parliamentarians in attendance.
Read by Emilia Torres, MP, Nicaragua
San Juan, Puerto Rico, 30 June 2004
I have the pleasure to address you on behalf of twenty-two Members of
Parliament present at this meeting from sixteen countries representing
the breadth of the political spectrum, from the Latin American,
Caribbean, North American and the European regions. We would first like
to express our gratitude to the President of the session for inviting us
to make this short intervention and express our active support for the
Cairo Programme of Action. We would also like to thank her Excellency
Governor Sila Maria Calderon for her warm hospitality. We are happy join
as fellow Parliamentarians to assist this fourth regional meeting on
ICPD Program of Action-related issues. This is a testament to the
importance of this meeting and the commitment from the lawmakers around
the world to reaffirming the ICPD Programme of Action.
In November 2002, the first International Parliamentarians Conference on
ICPD Implementation held in Ottawa launched a wave a parliamentary
mobilization to protect and uphold the international consensus to
guarantee each individual the right to decide freely and responsibly the
number and spacing of their children. The Parliamentary statements at
all UN regional commission meetings on ICPD around the world, such as
the UN ESCAP meeting in December 2002 for the Asia Pacific region, at
the European Population Forum in Geneva in January 2004, in Santiago in
March 2004 and most recently in Dakar in June at the UN ECA meeting,
demonstrate how Parliamentarians from all regions played a key role in
ensuring that their Governments protected and reaffirmed the ICPD
Programme of Action.
The ICPD Programme of Action specifically recognizes a strategic role
for Members of Parliament and we are happy to state that
Parliamentarians from all regions of the world have increasingly lived
up to this role thanks to the support of UNFPA, IPPF and numerous other
NGOs. If we Parliamentarians truly believe that individuals have the
right to make free and responsible choices about their own sexual and
reproductive well being, then we as Parliamentarians must also make
choices to promote policies to enable sexual and reproductive rights, to
conduct the diplomacy necessary to protect international agreements and
consensus and, naturally, to allocate the funds necessary to achieve the
ICPD promises.
Living up to the Cairo promises is now more urgent than ever before, and
unless we step up efforts, we will not achieve the Millennium
Development Goals all our countries have agreed. Over the course of this
five day meeting, all of us in this room know that more than 8,000 women
will have died as a result of pregnancy related complications; that
30,000 adolescents will have become infected with HIV/AIDS and that
1,068 women will have died as a result of unsafe abortions. This human
tragedy is completely unacceptable, particularly because it is
preventable. These individuals have the right to life.
When we discuss these issues and endorse the Santiago Declaration, we
should all recognize that the real work must then begin back in our
respective countries and this work must be grounded in the reality,
culture and daily life of the people on behalf of whom we claim to
speak. To take one example, by promoting abstinence until marriage in
regions of the world where women and young girls are not empowered to
say 'no' -- we are not helping anyone. We are in fact catering to
conservative attitudes, which fail to take into account the aspirations
of young people and those with specific needs. Such an unrealistic
approach towards sexuality, including the lack of access to qualified
personnel, the insufficient allocation of funding for reproductive
health services and inequalities in accessing existing services,
accounts for a large part of this preventable human tragedy. We must
also admit that a number of recent opinion polls in the region
demonstrate that the general population recognizes the right of women to
make their own decisions and it is our duty as elected representatives
to listen to the expressed wishes of our people. It is for this reason
that we firmly believe that these issues must be dealt with in a cross
party fashion overcoming political party differences. In this respect,
we particularly welcome the strong bi-partisan expression of support
from over one hundred Members of the US Congress in favour of
reaffirming the ICPD Programme of Action, in a letter dated 15 June.
We parliamentarians have actively laboured to overcome these challenges
by adopting new laws and policies and amending existing legislation to
reflect new commitments and priorities. External donor funding to ICPD
goals must remain high on the agenda of donor countries particularly
when we consider that the shortage in funding to ensure contraceptive
supplies around the world in measured in the hundreds of millions of
dollars. It is for this reason that we wish to state clearly our support
for continued and increase funding in this field, bilaterally, to the UN
-in particular UNFPA- and to progressive NGOs -in particular IPPF.
Let this penultimate regional meeting unambiguously reaffirm the ICPD
Programme of Action, as well as the Port of Spain and Santiago
Declarations, and thus strengthen the global consensus, which
Parliamentarians from each region of the world have pledged to use as
the basis of our work. Our political actions will be guided by our
responsibility in ensuring that the ICPD Programme of Action becomes a
reality for our most vulnerable people. At the first International
Parliamentarians' Conference on ICPD Implementation in Ottawa, over 100
Parliamentarians from 70 countries heard the alarm bell: "Life or death
is a political decision." We Parliamentarians chose life.
Thank you.
Min. Winston Williams, Antigua y Barbuda.
Rep. Aldo Carlos Neri, Argentina.
Sen. Marita Perceval, Argentina.
Rep. Erika Brockmann Quiroga, Bolivia.
Rep. María Teresa Paz Prudencio, Bolivia.
Rep. Enrique Accorsi Opazo, Chile.
Rep. Myrian Garcés Dávila, Ecuador.
Rep. Marie Jo Zimmermann, France.
Rep. Claude Greff, France.
Rep. Danielle Bousquet, France.
Rep. Emilia Torres, Nicaragua.
Rep. Gloria Young, Panama.
Rep. Rosa Merlo Drews, Paraguay.
Rep. Víctor Velarde Arrunátegui, Peru.
Rep. Ana Manso, Portugal.
Rep. Luisa Portugal, Portugal.
Rep. Cinta Castillo, Spain.
Rep. Chris Mc Cafferty, United Kingdom.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, United States of America.
Rep. Joseph Crowley, United States of America.
Rep. Margarita Percovich, Uruguay.
Rep. Marelys Pérez Marcano, Venezuela
All previous issues of the UNFPA Global Population Policy Update can now
be found on UNFPA's website at:
http://www.unfpa.org/parlamentarians/news/newsletters.htm
This newsletter is issued by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)
in its capacity as secretariat for the biannual International
Parliamentarians' Conference on the Implementation of the ICPD Programme
of Action (the first conference was held in November 2002, in Ottawa,
Canada). These dispatches are intended to highlight important
developments taking place around the world so that parliamentarians can
be kept informed of and learn from the successes, setbacks and
challenges encountered by their fellow parliamentarians in other
countries and regions in their efforts to promote the implementation of
the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population
and Development (September 1994, Cairo, Egypt). It should be noted that
UNFPA does not necessarily endorse all of the policies described in this
newsletter
Please send mailing list update information to Ragaa Said at
said@unfpa.org. If you have any questions or comments on the content of
this newsletter, please contact Harumi Kodama at kodama@unfpa.org or
Safiye Cagar at cagar@unfpa.org.
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