Live from Rio +20: Part 5
Posted on | June 15, 2012 by Timothy Herrmann |
Just got through the first round of today’s negotiations on the health, gender and education sections of the Rio +20 draft. Second round begins at 11pm. That’s right 11pm.
After 3 hours of intense debate it seems that sexual and reproductive health will remain in the document as “human rights” and that language supporting the “full implementation” of the ICPD Programme of Action will remain as well.
In the last hour of negotiations the G77 offered a compromise paragraph with “agreed language” that included these terms and every country accepted it except the Holy See, who stood their ground admirably. The good news was that the compromise did lead to population dynamics (read: population control) being kept out of the draft despite it being supported by the U.S., New Zealand, Canada, the EU, Norway, Australia, and Switzerland.
We have yet to see whether “reproductive rights” will be deleted from the draft. That is the topic of the negotiations that pick up at 9pm.
The African delegations continue to be MIA and the Arab states have not been as helpful as we had hoped. However, Russia did arrive at negotiations and was very vocal against what they called “an inordinate amount of focus on the single issue of reproductive health” in the draft.
More tomorrow! Stay posted.
