Resolution 5: Women’s Rights are Human Rights (Cairo +15)

Cairo 2009

FOLKPARTIET (SWEDEN)

Women’s rights are human rights (Cairo +15)

• Confirms the provision of universal access to reproductive health services, including family planning and sexual health as expressed in the programme of action adopted at The International Conference on Population and Development, ICPD, in Cairo, 1994.

• Recognizing the empowerment and autonomy of women, and improvements in their political, social, economic and health status, as essential for the achievement of sustainable development.

• Recognizing reproductive and sexual health as component of overall lifelong health and essential in the combat against infant and child mortality and maternal mortality.

• Upholding the principle that the human rights of girls and women are an inalienable and indivisible part of human rights, to be protected not only in areas of public life but also in the privacy of the home.

• Confirms that sexual and reproductive rights rest on the recognition of the human rights of women’s right to have control over and decide freely on matters related to their own bodies.

• Recognizing reproductive decision-making, including choice in marriage, family formation, and determination of the number, timing and spacing of one’s children; and the right to the information and the means to exercise those choices.

• Stresses that woman should be involved in all levels of the planning, implementation and evaluation of sexual and reproductive health care programmes.

• Notes that the principle of informed free choice is essential to the long-term success of family planning programmes.

• Stresses that abortion should not be promoted as a method of family planning, unwanted pregnancies should primary be prevented through sexual health education and family-planning services to reduce the rate of abortion.

• Calls upon the member parties to deal openly and forthrightly with unsafe abortion as a major public health concern.

• Declares that violence against women, in all its forms including sexual violence, is not just a health and social problem; it is a violation of women’s basic right to freedom from torture and ill treatment, their right to liberty and security of the person, and their right to physical integrity.

• Stresses that the international community should act when women’s rights, including those related to sexual and reproductive health, are violated.

• Calls upon the member parties to respect and protect women’s rights in their political work, including women’s sexual and reproductive rights.