UN conference reaffirms reproductive rights

The United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, also known as the Habitat II conference, met in Istanbul from June 3 to 14. It was the last major UN gathering of this millennium and the first major UN meeting since 1995's Fourth World Conference on Women (the "Beijing Conference")--and thus an important opportunity for a wider international community to weigh in on agreements reached in Beijing and at the International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in 1994. The final document that emerged from Habitat II, the "Global Plan of Action," affirmed crucial elements of those earlier accords. The Habitat documents calls for action to "[d]evelop and implement programmes to ensure universal access for women throughout their life-span to a full range of affordable health care services, including those related to reproductive health care, which includes family planning and sexual health, consistent with the Report of the International Conference on Population and Development." Language adopted at the Cairo meeting is also affirmed in Habitat's call for "universal access to the widest range of primary health care services." Perhaps most significantly, the Istanbul document reiterated an important declaration from the Beijing conference: "While the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural, and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind, it is the duty of all States to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms." Most of the 189 UN members and observer states that attended the conference upheld all three of these provisions. Only a small group of states--Argentina, Guatemala, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Malta, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, and the Holy See--filed reservations on the health care sections.