Paul Tuns:
The Non-Government Organization Committee on the Status of Women, New York (NGO CSW/NY) banned pro-life NGOs from holding official side-events at the Commission on the Status of Women, from March 14-25.
Pro-life groups such as Campaign Life Coalition and the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam) have held parallel events to present an alternative view to the predominant pro-abortion view of NGOs, UN agencies, and western delegates. This year, their applications were rejected by the NGO committee for the commission which oversees civil society participation at the Status of Women commission that run parallel to the intergovernmental conference at UN headquarters. The theme for this year’s conference is “Achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls in the context of climate change, environmental and disaster risk reduction policies and programmes.”
CLC applied on Dec. 16, 2021 to run a parallel event titled “The Rights of the Vulnerable are at the Center of Climate Solutions.” The application said they intended “to share how vulnerable populations need to be prioritized in calls to action surrounding climate impacts and how they are most often left behind.” CLC planned to highlight the importance of placing human beings at the centre of sustainable development efforts, reminding Member States that abortion should not be used as a solution to climate or other environmental concerns.
CLC received a response to their application: “Unfortunately, your request to host an event has been denied as your event does not align with NGO CSW/NY’s values and/or mandate.”
CLC communications director Pete Baklinski said, “We were surprised that our event was rejected” because CLC “has been an accredited Canadian non-governmental organization in Special Consultative Status with the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) for over two decades” and “during that time, we’ve participated in various commissions and events at the UN.”
C-Fam launched a petition and a letter signed by more than 400 pro-life groups, asking Sima Bahous, executive director of UN Women, “to ensure that organizations such as ours are not discriminated against in UN debates.” The letter stated, “It is entirely unacceptable that a UN agency or its surrogates like NGO/CSW would attempt to cancel and silence an entire sector of civil society.”
C-Fam’s Stefano Gennarini said in statement, “Participation in UN debates by non-governmental organizations has been a feature of UN debates since the founding of the United Nations” and NGOs that are “approved to participate in UN debates can only be blocked in extreme cases of political attacks on countries, ties to criminal activity, or complete failure to engage UN debates, according to UN rules of procedure.” However, he noted that pro-abortion and other left-wing groups have “openly called “for pro-life and pro-family organizations to be banned from UN debates altogether and to have their ECOSOC status revoked.” The UN’s Economic and Social Council approves which groups can be official NGOs at UN events. In recent years, there has been greater efforts to ban pro-life NGOs, including the UN Population Fund excluding pro-life and pro-family organizations from participating at the Nairobi Summit in 2019.
The C-Fam letter noted that “Several of the organizations writing this letter have applied to host parallel events through NGO/CSW and have been rejected multiple times in recent years.”
CLC noted, “In the past five years, we’ve organized various side events at the Women’s Commission (CSW) with various UN stakeholders, including an event that featured an experts’ panel featuring a Canadian Member of Parliament which was approved by that same committee last year,” leading Baklinski to ask, “What exactly changed?”
CLC submitted a written statement to the CSW, which was accepted and published on commission’s website, calling for respect for all human beings from the time of conception onward.
