Population conference yet to agree on Plan of Action

Population conference yet 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, it will be usefull as a yardstick to assess
CIPD implementation during the next population meeting in 2004.