NGO representative lobby for stronger declaration

JAKARTA (JP): Representatives of international non- governmental organizations (NGOs) are lobbying for the on-going Asia-Pacific women's conference to issue a stronger declaration, sources said yesterday.

The NGOs, who were invited as observers, have presented a united front in pushing the senior officials in the conference's drafting committees to rework the communique that will be issued at the end of the Second Asian and Pacific Ministerial Meeting on Women in Development.

The senior officials yesterday were busy putting the final touches to the document draft, to be officially called the Jakarta Declaration and the Plan of Action for the Advancement of Women in Asia and the Pacific.

The NGOs are demanding changes in the definition of the concepts of work, family and the links between cultural and religious values, and military and economic policies.

The concept of work, for example, should cover both paid and unpaid work, and include the informal and subsistence sectors as well as household chores.

This, they argued, would allow for appropriate tools and methods used to quantify such works and reflect women's total contribution in the national accounting systems.

The NGOs had already hammered out their common position when they met at the Asian and Pacific Symposium of NGOs on Women in Development in Manila last November.

They have since formed the Asian and Pacific NGO Working Group. The lobbyists are also armed with a document presented by 55 organizations that have formed the Asia Pacific Women's Action Network (APWAN).

"Women's rights are increasingly threatened and violated by militant assertions of religious and ethnic identity, in normal and in crisis situations," the APWAN document said. "While we advocate multi-culturalism, all cultural and religious practices, which deviate from universally accepted human rights including women's rights, must not be tolerated."

On personal relationships and traditional family norms, the NGOs are lobbying for individual rights, including those of lesbians,"...to freely choose their partners without prejudice on the basis of class, religion, sex or sexual orientation, and form the type of family they prefer."

"Lesbians face systematic physical and psychological violence from family, society and state institutions," they said.

The NGOs also want the Plan of Action to address the vulnerability of women during war time, with reference to the situations in Bosnia, Rwanda and Somalia.

"We hope the documents will include these views, to be eventually implemented by our governments," said Noeleen Heyzer of The Asian and Pacific NGO Working Group. (anr)