APPC senior officials fail to agree on Plan of Action
============ Tantri Yuliandini The Jakarta Post Bangkok, Thailand -----------------------
Senior officials at the Fifth Asian and Pacific Population Conference (APPC), hosted by Bangkok this year, have failed to agree on the final draft of the Plan of Action on population and poverty eradication due to reservations from the United States.
This failure would then shift the burden of finalizing the draft Plan of Action to ministers of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (UN-ESCAP), who will open their meeting on Monday.
The chairman of the drafting committee at APPC, Shahab Khawaja from Pakistan, said that all member countries had actually agreed to the draft except the United States, which gave its reservation over clauses on people's reproductive rights leading to abortion.
"We regret that the draft does not have the consensus of every member of the committee. There are still a lot of brackets, meaning there were no agreements," he said.
"We have received a proposal from the United States; we have considered it but an agreement could not take place, meaning differences between the countries and the United States cannot be bridged," he further said, adding that the issue would be brought to the ministerial meeting.
The chairman of the Senior Officials Meeting Committee of the Whole, J.V.R. Prasada Rao of India, said that the UN-ESCAP ministers may either decide to accept the document or extend the mandate for the drafting committee to continue deliberations over the text until an agreement is reached.
The U.S. delegation has indicated that should the ministers decide to adopt the draft Plan of Action, it would ask for a recorded vote.
The U.S. delegation posed as the lone barrier towards a consensus with its strong stance against some of the wording in the text, particularly over the chapter on reproductive rights and reproductive health, and the chapter on adolescent reproductive health, which it claimed to advocate abortion and underage sex.
To clarify their stance, the United States proposed a footnote to the draft Plan of Action which stated that "it is the view of the United States that none of these terms as employed in the documents listed and throughout this Plan of Action should be interpreted to constitute in any way an expression of support, endorsement, or promotion of abortion."
Despite the footnote, however, the delegation still insisted on changing some of the wording in the draft Plan of Action.
A member of the Indonesian delegation, Syamsiah Achmad, said that the proposed changes, however, would only dilute the commitments already made in the Cairo International Conference on Population Development (ICPD) in 1994.
She pointed out the agreements made during the ICPD in Cairo and its five-year review (known as ICPD+5) in 1999 clearly stated that "in no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning."
The ICPD stated further that "any measures or changes related to abortion within the health system can only be determined at the national or local level according to national legislative process."
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as the Asian Forum of Parliamentarians on Population and Development (AFPPD) which held their meeting in conjunction with APPC, expressed suspicions that the U.S. was "using" the international forum to push for amendments of its own laws on abortion.
"We would like to express our dismay and disappointment with the recent standpoint taken by the United States with regards to the ICPD," the AFPPD said in its statement of commitment.
In the statement, parliamentarians also agreed to "give high priority to achieving universal access to sexual and reproductive health services in national health and poverty reduction frameworks, both in terms of budget allocations and in terms of program activities."
Although the Plan of Action adopted at the Bangkok conference will not be binding, an assessment of its implementation will be useful during the next population meeting in 2004.