Dear All: The following message is from the coordinator of FEMISA, another list on the csf network. I thought some of you might find the discussion topic worthwhile. Please contact Greg Kelson if you have any questions about the paper or accessing femisa. Cheers Stefanie Rixecker ECOFEM Coordinator ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date: Tue, 23 Jun 1998 18:57:00 -0600 From: Greg Kelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Paper discussion In realizing that we have hit a dry spell in term of discussions on FEMISA in the past month, I am going to try to breathe some life back into the list. I have now put online a paper that I delivered at the ISA Annual Meeting in 1997 entitled "Monitoring the Beijing Platform for Action: Are Governments Keeping Their Commitments to Women?" A brief abstract of the paper follows: "The Beijing Platform for Action, which was approved by delegates at the United Nations Forth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China in September 1995, is perhaps one of the most important human rights documents to ever come into existence. The Platform is "an agenda for women's empowerment," getting its roots from the Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women. Within its 361 paragraphs are recommendations for giving this empowerment to women and female children covering health, armed conflict, decision making, education and human rights. "During the Beijing Conference, 89 countries and the Holy See (which had observer status at the conference) made commitments toward the implementation of the Platform. The commitments were as small as ratifying the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women to as major as establishing government councils to oversee the implementation of the Platform within their country. "This paper will look at the status of those commitments one year after the close of the conference. I will be doing this primarily by relying on U.S. Department of State Human Rights reports, U.N. sources and other legitimate sources that I find along the way. It will also make recommendations on how the Platform should be implemented uniformly worldwide. This paper will be a report that the Institute will update yearly as part of its commitment to assisting in the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action." I would invite you to download the paper from the following URL: http://www.angelfire.com/il/iwcp/beijing.html For the next two weeks (June 24 - July 8), I will make myself available to answer any comments that you have on the paper. Feel free to post your comments or any questions directly to the list. This paper covers several areas so I am sure you will have a lot to talk about. I am trying this as a summer experiment....if it goes off well, I will try to expand this in the fall as an ongoing feature of the list. Greg Kelson, FEMISA list manager and co-moderator FTGS Web Page - http://csf.colorado.edu/isa/sections/ftgs ************************************ Dr. Stefanie S. Rixecker Division of Environmental Management & Design Lincoln University, Canterbury PO Box 56 Aotearoa New Zealand E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax: 64-03-325-3841 ************************************
