CSW59: Regional Consultation for Europe, Caucasus, and Central Asia

Main goals of the Consultation

Taking advantage of many activists attending CSW, AWID took a poll of the interest in bringing together a regional consultation and received an overwhelming interest. The meeting was structured as a collective space for all who attended to address the following goals:

• discuss the situation in various parts of the region and catch up on that with one another;
• meet up and build a connection with other women’s rights and feminist activists and/or NGO representative from the region;
• get a sense of the most pressing issues we all are working on and how much the context and trends are shifting;
• discuss funding trends, how everyone is fairing financially, if anything is different from 5 years go;
• discuss and share preliminary plans and ideas for the AWID International Forum 2016. Representatives from AWID will share the details about upcoming AWID Forum 2016 in Brazil.

Key Discussion Points and Trends in the Regions Identified During the Consultation:

Participants identified several key backlashes against women’s rights in the various countries of the region. Participants also offered some self-reflections around current ways of organizing that may not have been most strategic or need to be adjusted to respond to current backlash. Overall, everyone agreed that the situation for women and girls is much worse than 5 years ago and organizing to address it needs to be updated. The following list of key trends emerged as overarching for most if not all countries in the region:

–          Increased religious and nationalist fundamentalisms;

–          Increased violation of human rights overall;

–          Crack downs on sexual and reproductive rights;

–          Association of human rights with western ideology and thus labeling women’s rights advocates as foreign agents;

–          Backlash and the misconception of gender equality with anti-gender movements;

–          Militarization of the region with open and ‘frozen’ conflicts and overall growing militarism as ideology of societies;

–          Attacks on women human rights defenders, feminist and LBTIQ activists;

–          Little funding for urgent responses to attacks against and burn out of activists

–          Complete drying out of funds, no financing for women’s rights work in the region anymore

Internal reflections on organizing:

–          Hierarchy of rights: whose rights are we fighting for and who is forgotten in the meantime? There is a concern that the mainstream women human rights defenders narrowly focused on their own understanding of human rights. Most human rights defenders are very picky in addressing the issues of stigmatized and discriminated communities. An internal review on homophobiaand transphobia within the movement is needed;

–          Age gap in activism and disconnect among generations of activists in the countries and region: need for cross-generational dialogue and strategizing;

–          No analysis of collective impact or sharing across the region of successful strategies;

–          Little documentation of regional cooperation, partnership, advocacy efforts etc

–          Need for a strong regional position to advocate against common trends.

Beijing Platform and Government Accountability:

Several of the participants acknowledged tremendous role of the Beijing Platform in the past 20 years for keeping governments accountable to the international instruments they have themselves signed. Examples of lobbying like in Kazakhstan and Georgia were shared, where using the Beijing Platform served as a basis for policy changes. At the same time it was acknowledged that in some countries of the region, with more oppressive regimes and systematic pressures and shrinking on civil societies, like Russia and Uzbekistan for example, it has been much harder to ensure international instruments are implemented and funded by the governments. Moreover, in Russia most of the structures responsible for implementation of the Beijing Platform curtailed their activities in the recent decade.

Questions emerged:

How can we ensure that the governments finance the 2-3 identified priority ideas?

How we can use international instruments lobbying for country level?

Role of [Alternative] Media:

The mass media is pushing for conservative values, and population agrees with this and becoming more and more unified in thinking. Alternative journalism is consistently under attack and shrinking with little resources unlike the state supported or privately funded mainstream media. There is a really urgent need to unify as one region among the feminist journalists as it is impossible to survive alone. Identifying key issues and strategies together is essential for any success in pushing back on mass media propaganda.

Questions emerged:

What are the ways for alternative feminist journalists to create not only a dialogue with one another but also a collective strategy of resistance?

Conflict in Ukraine and Militarization of the Region

Participants from Ukraine outlines several key challenges in the current war situation in Ukraine. Activists were reflecting that experiencing war was a completely new and unexpected experience for the country and adjusting strategies given shifted priorities was essential. Gender dimension of the conflict is real and overwhelming. The search for the experience across other regions which have gone through military conflicts revealed there has not been conducted any comprehensive study of gender dimension of the conflicts. The sense of the need for true not only verbal solidarity and sharing of experiences was shared across the activists. Women’s movement has a role in peace building in Ukraine and drawing on its experiences from working in the peaceful times and other colleagues from other countries in the war-ripped conditions. There is a need for a dialogue with activists in the aggressor state. Women’s movements across the countries must be involved in the peace building process. Representatives from Russian women’s rights groups offered explicit solidarity statement and an ask from international community, including UN Women on their role in creating a platform for a productive dialogue and building the peace process collectively.

Increase in domestic and other forms of violence against women: several participants identified violence against women as consistently on the rise with some visibility in some places and deeper taboos in others. There was a strong call for working with men and boys and adjusting the strategies to include men and boys in work for violence prevention and awareness.

Marginalization of Rights:

Activists working with and within the HIV positive persons, drug users, sex workers pointed out the hierarchy of rights that often exists in organizing in the region, particularly when conflict or other crisis hit. ECCA region is the highest in the rising HIV rates among women as well as tremendous increase among women drug users. Marginalizing their ‘issues’ and work is not helpful to push forward for universal human rights. Simple inclusion in the agendas of dominant discourse is also not helpful and patronizing. Working with and not including into agendas is the way to ensure there is no marginalization of rights and issues in the region. Questions like: who is vulnerable? Need to be asked each time discussions comes about ‘vulnerable’ populations and working with them or using them only as beneficiaries due to donor requests Same populations are agents of their own change and analysis of their situations and must be part of the solution driven discourse for universality of rights.

Economic and Political Unions of the Regional Governments:

Participants discussed the increasing political and economic agreements among the governments of the region, particularly the new economic zone with Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Belarus joining in. The concern of the zone is a complete dying out of the small and medium size businesses, with higher percentage of women owners.

Questions emerged:

How do we ensure collaboration among organizations monitoring political and economic agreements in all relevant countries of the region and work together on pushing back and exposing the true results of such agreements?

Could we create a communication platform to work together on economic empowerment aspects in the region?

Key Changes Needing to Take Place in the Region:

Given that the consultation took only 2 hours there are limits to what it can really achieve in terms of concrete solutions and steps forward. It is also important to recognize, while it was over 40 people at the consultation, it is by far not an exhaustive representation of regional activism and organizing. Thus, the suggested next steps and follow up humbly reflect on these limitations and offer an opening for deeper engagement among the activists and involving the international community and funders.

The following list of changes needed to take place was identified by the end of the consultation:

1. Influencing National Governments and International Agendas;
2. Feminist impact on and presence in the media;
3. More and better funding/financing of the movements;
4. Peace-building, de-militarization dialogues and concrete engagements;
5. Inclusive approach to rights, representation, organizing;
6. Reflecting on Our Past and present through documentation, analysis, and dialogue;
7. Cross-generational dialogue and activism;
8. Stronger positioning and protection mechanisms for Women Human Rights Defenders as well as prevention of burn out and self-care strategies;
9. Advancing strategies on confronting religious and nationalist fundamentalisms in the region;
10. Developing stronger connections to the global women’s rights movements;
11. Creation and maintenance of platform for dialogue and action across the region;
12. Influence on (sub)regions-wide political and economic agreements;
13. Engaging men against domestic violence.

Next Steps for the Funders and International Agencies:

This report should serve on one side as a refresher on current trends in the wider ECCA regions and on the other side as a call for action to the funders to engage closer with the movements in the regions to advance the agendas and priorities identified by the activists themselves. Funders and international agencies are invited to go deeper into understanding of the priority issue lists identified by the activists and evaluate if their own interventions are reflective of those priorities and if they need to be adjusted in discussions with the activists. Given the essence of the time with Post 2015 agenda and SDGs process coming to conclusion this year as well as the coming up of the AWID Forum, how do the funders and international agencies put forward their commitments to the movements in the region to have their agendas heard and advanced? Concretely, which of the identified priorities and how will funding community support?

Next Steps for the Activists:

The list of priorities is a strong call for collaboration and cross-boarder, cross-generation, cross-movement, and cross-identity organizing. Shrinking influence and spaces for women’s rights, feminist and LBTIQ activisms is a wake up call for doing thinking differently and build solidarity under shared and common causes.

–          Bringing in more activists into these discussions online and offline is a first step.

–          Ensuring strategies to address the key issues are identified and followed up on is the second.

–          AWID Forum could serve as a benchmark for moving agendas forward between now and May 2016 with few concrete outputs delivered by then.

–          Concrete individuals and groups will be engaging on moving forward particular parts of the identified priorities and transparent online communication in the created FB platform an email list serve.

 Angelika Arutyunova
Program Manager 
Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID)
www.awid.org

Photos by Galina Petriashvili