Authors: Nazila Isgandarova, D.Min.
As a member of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women (CCMW) and a jury member of the Peace Projects, on May 30-31, I attended the “Istanbul Summit: Women’s Perspective on UN Post-2015 Development Agenda”, which was sponsored by the Journalists and Writers Foundation with its Women’s and Abant Platform. The general aim of this summit was the UN Post-2015 Development Goals with aspirations to create awareness across societies worldwide.
Hundreds of women participants from across the world participated the Summit. They discussed women’s perspectives and opinions on the proposed SDGs. The women representatives of NGOs and women parliamentarians from across the world with diverse backgrounds especially focused on environmental, economic and social aspects of the MDGs. They also evaluated the yearlong discussions on the formulation of SDGs at a global gathering of women with hope to provide a follow-up to the 58th session of the Commission on the Status of Women to be held in March 2014 that will discuss the “Challenges and Achievements in the Implementation of the Millennium Development Goals for Women and Girls.”
In the eight working groups on the proposed SDGs, the representatives of the NGOs and the governments discussed the issues that might contribute to the unified dialogue on sustainable and inclusive development. The main topics of the working groups were but not limited to eradication of poverty, women’s empowerment, health, education, food security, water supply and sanitation, environment, climate change and energy, sustainable economic development, and peace and good governance, human rights and accountability mechanisms.
I attended the Women’s Empowerment working group led by Hon. Julia Duncan- Cassell, the Minister of Gender and Development of the Republic of Liberia. The participants of the group discussed documents, such as Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) as well as Agenda 21, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the Millennium Declaration. In my presentation on the status of Muslim women, briefly introduced the CCMW and its recent projects on domestic violence against women and the niqab. I agreed that the women’s situation gets worse in some Muslim countries, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, etc. One of the reasons of the worsened situation is the lack of cooperation with the male religious authority in these countries who still hold a tremendous power on women. In order to bring them to the table, there should be diverse approaches how to pursue them to contribute to the women’s empowerment. I suggested that these attempts must consider a cultural safety perspective in order to be effective. Nevertheless, such an approach does not mean that we should negate or sacrifice the inherent human rights of women for the sake of someone or something. Women, like all creation, deserve to have the capacity to become someone or something. However, the world lacks a mechanism or a system that ensures that these rights are not taken away from women. Therefore, in many countries, including in many Muslim countries, gender equality is not respected or implemented as it was outlined in the Convention of Elimination and Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
Participants of the working group of the women’s empowerment agreed that women’s organizations and the governments has to work hard in order to achieve equality and human dignity in the world because the target of the MDGs have not yet reached; instead, the issues are getting worse and tangible with respect to the women’s rights year after year. They discussed how to implement MGDs in a sensitive manner so that it may prevent and eliminate all forms of violation against girls and women, empower women economically, and ensure that all women own and inherit property, have legal rights on accessing economic activities, to ensure entrepreneurship activities; eliminate legal, cultural and social obstacles for women to enter political, economic and public life, etc.
Overall, the Istanbul Summit raised aspirations for women how to learn from each other’s experience and develop global cooperation between women NGO representatives and parliamentarians. Furthermore, it provided opportunities for NGOs and the government representatives to express their views on the UN Post-2015 Development Agenda.
