Labour and Co-operative Member of
Parliament for Kemptown and Peacehaven

The last day of the NGO forum

by Lloyd on 25.08.10
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Well Mexico continues to surprise! Today we have had shouting, filibustering, pro-life campaigners the Mexican government threatening the pull the youth conference and a 6 hour plenary meeting to tray and agree everything!

It started off with a plenary where we presented what we had so far from the working groups – but people were already starting to get worked up. Particularly articularte people were getting annoyed that the couldnt say what they wanted rarther than going to the groups.

For some reasons you get a class of young people at tehtese events that 1) thinks they are some UN diplomate and needs to make sure that language and diplomatic process if followed to the letter, 2) that they shouldn’t put any work in the group and still get their way and 3) refuse to just follow the process when it doesn’t go their way!

Well all three atributes were on show today. When we got to the group people were disgrunted that they couldn’t get around everywhere – the concept of prioritisation and choosing where you want to influence goes completely out the window.

When the groups did settle down were were back to old tricks in the Gender Working group. One moment that please me was when one of the delegates form Mexico stood up and said “we Mexicans can not accept the plural gender identities it doesn’t exist in Mexico” followed by another delegate from Mexico who said “please don’t claim to speak for Mexico becuase you don’t I am from Mexico and I support what they are saying”.

I find this often to be the case that people want to preserve a conservative view always try and claim that progressive views are some western imperialism or not culturally relevant to them – well I say that it bull shit – all cultures are pluralistic and there are many views in all of them – progressives and conservatives , lets have the debate on those terms rather than behind the shrouded of “culture”

One paragraph that I did manage to remove was one preserve and re-constructing religion and culture. It was in my view a way of saying that we should not move forward. Rather than saying lets celebrate and allow everyone the space to develop and express their own culture it was treating culture as something of a museum piece that everyone should abide by – well that is now OUT!

The plenary session which was a the start of the week meant to last 3 hours took over 6 hours and by the time we got to heath we were all tired.

Some lines of the gender area had been removed – which was a same but most of it stayed intact – despite a pro-life anti-lgbt lobby group trying to flyer all the chairs with fake documents before conference – no one fell for it!

In the end we passed a paragraph to support safe abortions overwhelmly – at which pint the Mexican government asked for an emergency meeting with the SOFOC and the fun into the night has begun.

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Labour and Co-operative Member of
Parliament for Kemptown and Peacehaven

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