Population meeting kicks off amid homosexuality dispute
Participants of a Pro-life and Pro-family side events to ICPD-25 forum at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, yesterday. They represent Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops, NCCK and the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya. PD/SAMUEL KARIUKI
More controversy rocked the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD25) in Nairobi as 10 countries led by the United States criticised its support for abortion, hours before curtains came down on the three-day meeting.
In a statement, the countries threatened to disown the outcomes of the conference noting that preparations for the summit were not consultative, and done by a few countries. This, they said left out a huge chunk of UN General Assembly membership.
Addressing the press yesterday, the US, Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Senegal, Kenya, Uganda, Egypt, Belarus and St Lucia said the conference veered off the resolutions made in Cairo 25 years ago by introducing new agenda.
“We are also concerned about content of some of the key priorities of this summit. We do not support references in international documents to ambiguous terms and expressions, such as sexual and reproductive health and rights, which do not enjoy international consensus, nor contemplates the reservations and caveats incorporated into the Cairo outcome,” the statement read by the US’s Special Representative for Global Women’s Health, Valerie Huber said.
US Ambassador to Kenya Kyle McCarter said every person has a right to life and his government has made this clear in its constitution. “I have a personal reason that every life is important, and therefore, I cannot support abortion. I have sad memories about it,” he added.
National Assembly’s deputy minority whip Chris Wamalwa concurred saying that any legislative process should reflect the democratic expression of the will of the people, through their freely elected representatives.
“We cannot support sex education that fails to adequately engage parents and which promotes abortion as a method of family planning. But we support “proper regard for parental guidance and responsibilities as contained in sections of the ICPD Programme of Action and giving young people the skills to avoid sexual risk,” he added.
The 10 governments re-affirmed the key foundational principles of the ICPD programme of Action, including that everyone has the right to life, liberty and individual security, and that the family is the basic unit of society, calling for its strengthening.
“We strongly support the holistic pursuit of the highest attainable outcomes of health, life, and dignity. We further wish to emphasise that the agreement reached at Cairo remains a solid foundation for addressing new challenges,” they said.
According to the US, this should be done within a consensus-driven process that gives each government equal opportunity to negotiate a broadly accepted document within the UN, re-affirming that health is a precondition for an outcome and indicator of the realisation of the ICPD.
The protesting governments said that the Cairo conference did not create any new international human rights, meaning that with consultations, the Nairobi Summit could have been the platform for meeting most of the 1994 aspirations.
“We would have appreciated more transparency and inclusiveness in the preparation of the conference, including regarding criteria for civil society participation. While the Cairo programme of action was negotiated and implemented with and by the entire UN General Assembly membership, only a handful of governments were consulted on the planning and modalities of just ended meeting.
“Therefore, outcomes from this summit are not inter-governmentally negotiated, nor are they the result of a consensus process. As a result, they should not be considered normative, nor should they appear in future documents as intergovernmental-agreed language,” they stated.
However, during the closing ceremony, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and its partners said the summit had achieved a lot.
