Standing Strong for a Woman's Right to a Just and Healthy Life

Yesterday, the UN’s Commission for Population and Development (CPD) opened its 46th session. The week-long session will focus on new trends in migration.

In his opening remarks, Babatunde Osotimehin, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), emphasized the rights of female migrants among the issues most important to UNFPA’s work. Osotimehin noted women and girls make up nearly half of all the estimated 214 million migrants worldwide. He continued:

Building a life in a new country can foster greater independence and  self-confidence, and create opportunities for the empowerment of women. However, breaking down established values and practices also creates tension and vulnerability. Moreover, all too often, female migration is accompanied by exploitation and abuse and trafficking across borders, especially in unregulated and informal sectors of the economy where women predominate. These women typically have limited or no access at all to health insurance and public services, including much needed reproductive health services.

This week, IWHC and other women’s rights groups will be focusing on several key issues as government delegations negotiate a resolution.

• Since a large percentage of the migrant population is of reproductive age, the CPD should ensure that women, men, and young people who migrate have access to sexual and reproductive health services, including contraception, evidence-based comprehensive sexuality education, safe abortion, and prevention, testing and treatment of sexually transmitted infections. Migrants often experience barriers to sexual and reproductive health services.
• Migration can empower women and girls and offer them economic opportunities, but it can also be a process fraught with risk. Women and girls can experience exploitation and abuse while migrating, and in the host country. It’s critical the CPD make special provisions for the protection of female migrants against abusive labor conditions, and against sexual violence and exploitation.
• Women and girls may be migrating to leave an abusive marriage, or escape gender-based violence. Current conflicts in Syria and Congo, for example, have brought about fresh crises of rape being used as a weapon of war. For that reason, migration policies must pay particular attention to the situation of women and girls fleeing violence.
• Many migrants leave their homes to escape persecution because of real or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. States must put in place mechanisms to ensure these persons can seek refuge in a new country.
• Finally, we’ll be watching to make sure that governments respect and promote the human rights of all and provide health and social services to all, regardless of migration or national status.

IWHC staff will be at the UN this week, so watch the #CPD46 hashtag on Twitter for our live updates.

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In 2000, the UN established eight international development goals (the MDGs) — ranging from eradicating extreme poverty to improving maternal health — to be achieved by 2015. Now that this deadline is upon us, the international community is looking ahead to define what’s come to be known as the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

Last summer, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon established the High-Level Panel (HLP), a group of 27 international government officials and civil society experts, to guide the development of the Post-2015 framework. The HLP recently convened in Bali for a meeting before they submit recommendations to Ban in May. Along with more than 100 youth delegates, I participated in a parallel youth multistakeholder meeting, which included an outreach event with key players such as High Level Panelist John Podesta of the Center for American Progress and Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institute.

In preparation for our meeting with the HLP, we were tasked with the impossible: to distill the vision and priorities of young people, all 3.5 billion of us, into a tidy presentation on what we hope to see in the next development framework. Compelled by this rare opportunity to provide direct inputs into what continues to be a frustratingly inaccessible process, we managed to catalog what matters most to young people, drawing on our own discussions as well as outcomes from prior and ongoing post-2015 youth meetings. Gender equality and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) emerged as areas of strong thematic consensus.

The Youth Communiqué, which documents the outcomes of the Bali youth meeting, calls for a transformative and transparent new development agenda, and includes strong language on inclusion and rights.  We also call for a number of commitments to gender equality and SRHR, including universal access to quality education (including Comprehensive Sexuality Education) and youth-friendly health services, a commitment to gender equality, the elimination of gender-based violence and the recognition of young people’s diverse sexual orientations and gender identities.

Inclusion was a striking theme of this meeting.  As we discussed the need for meaningful youth participation on the whole, we highlighted the challenge of ensuring that the most marginalized young people are included in the next development agenda.  Drawing heavily on commitments made during the 2012 Global Youth Forum, we demanded the recognition of young people with disabilities, sex workers, indigenous youth, and young people living with HIV/AIDS as valued stakeholders in the Post-2015 Development Agenda process.

Upcoming events throughout the summer (including another HLP meeting in mid-May and the ICPD Regional Reviews) present immediate opportunities for young people to mobilize yet again.  We must use these opportunities not only to further define our asks and non-negotiables, but also to continue challenging the limited and often superficial opportunities for meaningful youth participation. The fight is far from over. It’s crucial that we build on the momentum from Bali to claim this agenda as our own. 

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