Stefano Gennarini
(ZENIT News – Center for Family and Human Rights / Barsalogho, 08.26.2024).- Western countries added a poison pill to a new binding international treaty on the right to development. The poison pill is related to abortion. The treaty would become the first to include an obligation related to “sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights.”
The purpose of the new treaty is to affirm the sovereignty of developing countries and their right to pursue their economic and social development without interference from former colonial powers.
The irony is that the new language is considered by many to be the New Colonialism; abortion rights, homosexual/transgender rights, and sexual rights for children. All these issues are Western impositions on the mostly more traditional countries of the Global South.
Many developing countries may think that terms related to reproductive health in international policy are harmless or can be interpreted in a benign way at the national level. Longtime experts say they are wrong and that these governments fail to realize the reality in adding the phrase to a new binding agreement.
The confusion surrounding the treaty arises from the fact that these terms have been part of non-binding international agreements for many years.
The powerful Western governments see these phrases one way while the developing world see them in another way. Given that the West has all the money, it is assured that these phrases do not mean maternal health, family planning, and HIV/AIDs prevention but rather the plethora of sexual rights promoted by the West.
Developing countries might think that they can avoid controversial interpretations of the reproductive health language in the new treaty by defining it in national laws and policies in the same way as they do with non-binding agreements.
But this is dangerous territory because the phrase “sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights” would not have a blank meaning to be filled in by national laws. It would have an international legal meaning. That international meaning would not be determined by looking solely to national laws and policies, but also to Western-backed international programs on reproductive health based in existing UN agreements. Such an interpretation would necessarily include abortion rights and homosexual/transgender rights.
This is especially true because UN member states who participated in the negotiations of the treaty so far did not include any caveats, qualifications, or other limitations on how the reproductive health language should be understood. The term was added at the end of the negotiations of the draft treaty in Geneva last year, without giving governments an opportunity to object or even provide more context for the term.
This is in stark contrast to the negotiations of the only other international treaty that mentions reproductive health, the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights and Dignity of Persons with Disabilities (hereinafter, the “CRPD”). When that treaty was negotiated twenty years ago, UN member states agreed explicitly that abortion was not an international right in a footnote that was part of the record of the negotiations of that treaty. No such footnote was agreed in the negotiating record of the new treaty on the right to development, even though reproductive health language has become more controversial than twenty years ago. Now, it includes sexual rights issues, and not just abortion.
The inclusion of “sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights” undermines the very purpose of the new treaty, namely, to prevent Western interference in domestic politics and policymaking in countries that were once their former colonies.
The UN General Assembly is set to decide on the fate of the new treaty in coming weeks.
