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309 Personal Reflection: The C irc le of Em powerment Aurora Javate de Dios, P hilippines As one of the CEDAW experts from 1994–1998, I had the rare opportunity of “engaging the State” in a critical dialogue about the Convention. Until then, I had always thought of UN processes as too remote to be appreciated by NGOs and much less by ordinary women. As an activist, who had worked for many years in social movements and in the “parliament of the streets” in the Philippines, I found the Committee’s work and processes too tedious and bureaucratic at first. Over time, however, I realized how valuable it was to learn from the experiences and insights of my colleagues as well as from representatives of countries reporting to the Committee. I began to appreciate that although sustained monitoring by Committee members of compliance with and implementation of the Convention can be tedious, it is an urgent and necessary task requiring full dedication and commitment of the experts. The interdisciplinary expertise of CEDAW Committee members, coming from different regions and cultures, enriched my own understanding of the complex tapestry of issues and problems affecting women in various parts of the world in the context of differing cultures, as well as legal and political systems. Indeed, working in the Committee gave me the feeling of being part of a long and historical process as well as of the chain of women and men who have fought for women’s voices to be heard and respected at the international level. During my four years in the CEDAW Committee, I was fortunate enough to participate in some of the highpoints in its history. These were the participation of the Committee in the Fourth UN World Conference on Women in Beijing and the discussion and debate on the Optional Protocol to the Convention. The massive and global mobilization of women for the Beijing Conference infused it with the dynamism of tens of thousands of women who had participated at every stage of the preparatory processes (Friedman 2003). Interest in the Beijing Conference and the discussions on the draft Beijing Platform for Action brought renewed attention and interest in the Convention, as evidenced by most intense discussions and new documents produced by international organizations, governments, and NGOs focusing on the work of the CEDAW Committee. It became obvious that the transnational women’s movement that had emerged in the 1990s had effectively utilized opportunities for participation in the United Nations and had developed expanded structures for mobilization through networking and evolving similar or shared frameworks. The parallel NGO conferences alongside official UN Conferences in the 1990s provided NGOs with a much needed opportunity to consolidate their agendas and lobbying efforts to influence the final official Conference outcomes (Friedman 2003). At the NGO Forum in 1995 in Huairou, which lasted for ten days, almost four thousand workshops and panels were held, many of which referred to the Convention and its Committee. In addition sixty thousand e-mail messages were recorded and over one hundred thousand visits to the NGO website were noted (Anand et al. 1998, 25–26), reflecting the massive engagement of women in the Beijing processes. Participating in the Philippine delegation to the UN World Conference in Beijing as well as in the parallel NGO Forum, I witnessed the excitement and the tensions resulting from intense divisions both between and among governments as well as among women’s groups. Such divisions centered mostly on issues of reproductive rights and sexual orientation. Anti-abortion and antireproductive health and rights groups conducted an aggressive campaign throughout both the NGO Forum and the official Conference in Beijing, sometimes disrupting proceedings with their unauthorized presence in closed-door meetings of the official Conference. The challenges and difficulties posed by conservative countries and groups during the negotiations in Beijing crystallized the strategic importance of the CEDAW Convention as the only legally binding human rights instrument for women that a majority of UN member States have committed to implementing. Although the Convention has been in force since 1981, many feminists and women’s groups began to view it in a new light after 1995, and saw the programmatic Beijing Platform for Action as a powerful instrument to complement it. Fortunately, despite the intense debates and the strong opposition of conservative groups, the legitimacy of women’s rights as human rights was firmly established in the Beijing Platform for Action. While working in the CEDAW Committee, I was constantly faced with the...

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