UNGASS+5: The clock is ticking
UNGASS+5 Daily Diary - 31 May 2006
The UN General Assembly special session to review progress on HIV and AIDS over the past five years (UNGASS+5) gets underway here in New York this morning. For the past couple of days people have been running all over town pulling their hair out. What is on their minds? The current version of the ‘outcomes document’ – the piece of paper summarising the collective views of 190 or so governments, which will be spat out of this UN circus at the end of the week.
If you are already confused how an ‘outcome document’ can be prepared before the meeting has actually happened, welcome to the Alice in Wonderland world of the United Nations. ‘Outcome’ in UN-speak means: What do we (governments) know going into the meeting, and what do we want to say happened during the session?
Even though many participants are being as diplomatic as they can muster, I have yet to meet anyone here who thinks the current version of the outcomes document is acceptable. Why?
To start with, the reasons why we need another UNGASS ‘declaration’ are not clear. A meeting of this magnitude is an obvious a chance to get governments and the UN to give a genuine assessment of how well/badly we have done since the first UNGASS –(that is, after all, what I thought a ‘review’ was) – to re-state their commitment to stopping AIDS as well as previous commitments, and to map out their forward-looking plans for turning the epidemic around. So a document of some kind capturing those elements sounds like a good idea.
Sadly, the current draft outcomes document reads more like a Hollywood re-run of the UNGASS 2001 Declaration of Commitment – a new wish-list. As one delegate stated candidly, “It’s like the first draft was a Christmas tree, and we have all come along and stuck our respective decorations onto it.” The document re-opens a lot of the original declaration content and adds a sprinkling of new issues and themes that have emerged since 2001.
What is needed is an outcome document that reaffirms and builds on the original Declaration and adds the specific issues and priorities that have arisen since then. That would provide a framework to guide the global and national AIDS responses for the next five years.
Given the track record of the past five years, since the UNGASS 2001 AIDS promises were made, the report of this meeting should also include some humility and an expression of regret by people in positions of power and authority for just how badly we have done to address the epidemic.
Another main reason the current document is very weak is that AIDS is obviously now a political issue, and once you enter the political arena, it seems consensus is pretty much impossible on anything. Each government has political points to score this week as well as ‘do’ something about AIDS. So many are trying to move the UNGASS review conclusions closer to their own stance and preferred policies – and not just AIDS policies, but also trade policies; foreign policies; conservative moral policies; human rights and democratic policies – and these are unfortunately more important to some governments than the thousands of people who dies as a result of AIDS or are newly infected with HIV every day. This is the down-side for the past five years of asking for AIDS to be made more political so it carries more weight in international affairs, and gets more extensively funded.
Similarly, many NGOs and other civil society organisations see the UN review as an opportunity to get their priority themes onto the international agenda for the next five years, giving their advocacy and funding arguments the official ‘backing’ of all UN Member States.
So what happens when all these agendas are vying for position? All too often our well-intentioned talk fails us – as they have here already at UNGASS.
Instead of creating something new and realizing the opportunities that are just out of our collective reach, we polarize, entrench and focus on differences of opinion. When the stakes are high, add in a sense of pressure and the international AIDS ‘community’ hardens around positions that we then defend by advocacy within our own stakeholder groups. Governments argue with governments about whether they can use words like condom, for example, and NGOs disagree about whether integrating AIDS with TB is more vital than with sexual and reproductive health services.
We typically walk away without learning about what we might have done differently; what we did to get the result we got, or what to do next time. The sense of fragmentation and separation gets reinforced.
Meanwhile the clock is ticking.
The UN General Assembly special session to review progress on HIV and AIDS over the past five years (UNGASS+5) gets underway here in New York this morning. For the past couple of days people have been running all over town pulling their hair out. What is on their minds? The current version of the ‘outcomes document’ – the piece of paper summarising the collective views of 190 or so governments, which will be spat out of this UN circus at the end of the week.
If you are already confused how an ‘outcome document’ can be prepared before the meeting has actually happened, welcome to the Alice in Wonderland world of the United Nations. ‘Outcome’ in UN-speak means: What do we (governments) know going into the meeting, and what do we want to say happened during the session?
Even though many participants are being as diplomatic as they can muster, I have yet to meet anyone here who thinks the current version of the outcomes document is acceptable. Why?
To start with, the reasons why we need another UNGASS ‘declaration’ are not clear. A meeting of this magnitude is an obvious a chance to get governments and the UN to give a genuine assessment of how well/badly we have done since the first UNGASS –(that is, after all, what I thought a ‘review’ was) – to re-state their commitment to stopping AIDS as well as previous commitments, and to map out their forward-looking plans for turning the epidemic around. So a document of some kind capturing those elements sounds like a good idea.
Sadly, the current draft outcomes document reads more like a Hollywood re-run of the UNGASS 2001 Declaration of Commitment – a new wish-list. As one delegate stated candidly, “It’s like the first draft was a Christmas tree, and we have all come along and stuck our respective decorations onto it.” The document re-opens a lot of the original declaration content and adds a sprinkling of new issues and themes that have emerged since 2001.
What is needed is an outcome document that reaffirms and builds on the original Declaration and adds the specific issues and priorities that have arisen since then. That would provide a framework to guide the global and national AIDS responses for the next five years.
Given the track record of the past five years, since the UNGASS 2001 AIDS promises were made, the report of this meeting should also include some humility and an expression of regret by people in positions of power and authority for just how badly we have done to address the epidemic.
Another main reason the current document is very weak is that AIDS is obviously now a political issue, and once you enter the political arena, it seems consensus is pretty much impossible on anything. Each government has political points to score this week as well as ‘do’ something about AIDS. So many are trying to move the UNGASS review conclusions closer to their own stance and preferred policies – and not just AIDS policies, but also trade policies; foreign policies; conservative moral policies; human rights and democratic policies – and these are unfortunately more important to some governments than the thousands of people who dies as a result of AIDS or are newly infected with HIV every day. This is the down-side for the past five years of asking for AIDS to be made more political so it carries more weight in international affairs, and gets more extensively funded.
Similarly, many NGOs and other civil society organisations see the UN review as an opportunity to get their priority themes onto the international agenda for the next five years, giving their advocacy and funding arguments the official ‘backing’ of all UN Member States.
So what happens when all these agendas are vying for position? All too often our well-intentioned talk fails us – as they have here already at UNGASS.
Instead of creating something new and realizing the opportunities that are just out of our collective reach, we polarize, entrench and focus on differences of opinion. When the stakes are high, add in a sense of pressure and the international AIDS ‘community’ hardens around positions that we then defend by advocacy within our own stakeholder groups. Governments argue with governments about whether they can use words like condom, for example, and NGOs disagree about whether integrating AIDS with TB is more vital than with sexual and reproductive health services.
We typically walk away without learning about what we might have done differently; what we did to get the result we got, or what to do next time. The sense of fragmentation and separation gets reinforced.
Meanwhile the clock is ticking.
posted by Tim France at 11:00 AM
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