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Governments report on gains, key challenges, and opportunities

APCSOB2020141119bMinisters from the Asia and the Pacific region met today in the Asian and Pacific Conference on Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment: Beijing+20 Review to report on their States' gains, key challenges, and opportunities to achieve gender equality and the empowerment of women after twenty years of the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA). The governments' pledges and priority areas for investment for the next five years will be included in a final ministerial declaration to be adopted at the end of the conference on November 20, 2014.

A representative on behalf of civil society organizations (CSO) delivered a statement to the governments during the ministerial meeting. "The Beijing Platform for Action is an unfinished promise," Abia Akriam from the CSO Steering Committee said. "States need to be accountable."

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Call for accountability mechanisms to implement Beijing Platform for Action

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(also below)

Note: This was the CSO consolidated statement read during the Agenda Item 2 session by a member of the CSO Steering Committee at Day 1 Nov 17, 2014 of the Asian and Pacific Conference on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment: Beijing+20 Review.)

APCSOB2020141119CThank you madam chair. I would like to thank you for this opportunity to speak on behalf of the Asia Pacific Civil society Organisations Steering Committee for the Beijing +20. We really hope that the following areas will be addressed during this review process:

We would like to flag that the single greatest barrier to the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action is the lack of binding and meaningful accountability mechanisms. Governments derive their mandate from their capacity/ to be accountable to their constituents. Accountability requires time-bound targets, transparent reporting and monitoring, adequate funding and resources and yet it requires so much more.

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Climate change, SOGI, sexual rights, and violence against women among contended issues

Governments at the Asian and Pacific Conference on Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment: Beijing+20 Review finalized discussing the draft ministerial outcomes document that will be approved at the end of the conference by member states of the Asia-Pacific region. State delegations discussed, improved, changed, and approved language in the document related to the 12 critical areas of concern identified twenty years ago in the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA). They also agreed on the measures States will take to accelerate the implementation of this platform of action. Civil society organizations have been active in lobbying governments throughout.