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NGOs NGOs Barred from Speaking at Special Session
By Thalif Deen
Excerpt from International Press Sevice
July 1, 1999United Nations - A coalition of more than 100 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) accused the United Nations of shutting them out of the three-day General Assembly special session on Population and development, which ends Friday. "We have been harassed," Afaf Mahfouz, president of the Conference on Non-Governmental Organisations (CONGO) complained Thursday. "We are being subject to new security restrictions, and we don't even know whether we will be allowed to speak." In a resolution unanimously adopted at an NGO meeting Thursday, the groups said: "We deeply regret that without prior notice, NGOs have apparently been excluded from the opportunity to deliver oral statements in any of the plenary sessions of the General Assembly." In a letter addressed to General Assembly President Didier Opertti Badan of Uruguay, CONGO sought an assurance that NGOs will still have an opportunity to speak before the special session ends, most likely by late Friday night. Mahfouz told IPS that NGOs are permitted to speak under existing General Assembly rules, but only if and when there is time available after government delegations have had their say. Invariably, she said, NGOs are kept waiting until the eleventh hour and then informed that time has run out. "They always trick us," she said. Yet some diplomats have countered that, under General Assembly rules, not even UN agency heads can speak at the podium of the plenary session. To change the system to allow greater NGO inclusion, one UN official said, would require rewriting those rules. The session, also called 'ICPD Plus Five,' is a follow-up to the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo. Yet the current three-day meeting is only the latest example of what some NGOs claim is a pattern of their exclusion from UN affairs.
In a letter to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the NGOs have asked him to "actively reconsider the process by which the implementation of important UN conferences are reviewed and appraised. " Regrettably, the letter says, the entire ICPD review process "has become a reassessment of the fundamentals that were resoundingly agreed and firmly established in Cairo." The consequence is a situation in which procedures are prevailing over substance, and scarce human and financial resources of the UN, governments and also of civil society are apparently being wasted, the letter adds. As the Cairo review process has evolved, NGOs have been increasingly marginalised, the letter notes....
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