If there is such a thing as ‘choreographed chaos', it's been happening here at the CSW for the past two weeks in the Vienna café in the UN. Hundreds of women have passed through each day and sat amongst the empty coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays as they have met with representatives - from the Permanent Missions, the official delegations to the CSW, the Special Rapporteurs, employees from the four UN gender agencies - Unifem, UNDAW, OSAGI and INSTRAW, and many of the 253 NGO's here. At the same time they have composed statements, reports, position papers and resolutions, or at least found out how to, and what exactly each one is, how and when they have to be submitted, and in how many copies (eleven copies in advance for an application to speak for three minutes). And all this has happened in between attending the formal sessions, the caucuses, the forums and the parallel events....
Across the road in Church Center, the parallel sessions have continued on various floors. Sussan Tahmasebi is one of the women behind the One Million Signatures Campaign in Iran. Still in the process of appealing against a two year suspended sentence for organising a protest, and barred from travelling for past two years, she has just had the ban lifted. She made it to CSW in order to present a more positive image of Iran than the one she feels is reported by the world's media.
"It's important to make the connection at international level and to be heard at international level. Iranian women have accomplished a great deal, especially socially and people don't really recognise that. We are here to present a real picture of Iranian society and a real picture of Iranian women's status. And also to talk about the fact that we are looking to create these changes, that we have a vibrant women's movement and that a lot of the changes we are demanding are in line with the changes other women in the region are demanding and that the UN is specifically working on in the region".
Elahe Amani of Women's Intercultural Network ran a session on Women and Leadership. "Women from the grassroots come here through the NGOs to address the issues and provide knowledge for the official delegations. But I've been coming for three years and I've never seen on official delegate attend a session, so you have two completely isolated dialogues, across the road from each other". But Elahe keeps coming to the CSW because "it provides a space for women's NGO's to come together and network; it's valuable because each year we share resources with each other, so if I prepare a document on violence against women I send it to people I know from the CSW in South Africa, China, India.
Each woman has a specific reason to be here, yet all share the common goal of trying to create a common understanding and build the movement promoting women's human rights. At one session this year it was declared that the four things women need in order to participate fully in politics are: confidence, culture, child care - and cash. Most of the women I've met here have some of these things, but I haven't met a single woman who has cash. Not one. And neither do the UN agencies dealing with gender. Unifem has one fortieth of the money that Unicef has, which is why the key battle to reform the gender architecture of the UN continues year after year....
Recent research by Unifem indicates that if we continue to make progress towards gender equality at the current rate, women will not have equal political participation until 2045. So year after year more than a thousand women's human rights advocates return to the UN CSW to work round the clock for two weeks, trying to force the pace of change, and to make the link between the reality of women's lives and the UN Commission on the Status of Women, which is, after all, the principal global policy making body dedicated exclusively to gender equality and the advancement of women.