Above the Arctic Circle, Ban sees first-hand view of climate change’s impact

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has travelled above the Arctic Circle today to experience first-hand the impact of climate change on the fragile region, as fewer than 100 days remain before the start of the United Nations conference where countries will aim to reach a new agreement on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

Gaza: UN receives €13 million cash injection to ease unemployment crisis

A United Nations-backed employment scheme in Gaza is set to receive a €13 million boost from the European Union that will create more than 1.4 million work days for the jobless in the Strip, the UN agency tasked with providing basic services for Palestinian refugees announced today.

New military chief of joint African Union-UN force in Darfur begins work

The new Force Commander of the joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping operation in Darfur formally assumed his duties today in the troubled western Sudanese region.

Bye bye to the 100W bulb

From today, the European Union has banned the import and manufacture of domestic 100 watt bulbs in order to curb emissions of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.

More than 100 Haitian orphans receive aid from Nepalese UN peacekeepers

Nepalese troops serving with the United Nations mission in Haiti, known as MINUSTAH, have delivered food, clothing and medical care to some 112 orphaned children in a remote mountain village, the UN peacekeeping operation announced today.

Who said giving the EP more powers was a good thing?

A new report from the cross-party House of Lord’s EU Scrutiny Committee will make yet more uncomfortable reading for all those Yes campaigners who are still, against all the evidence, operating under the illusion (or lie more like) that the Lisbon Treaty will be good for national parliamentary democracy.

The report looks at the meaning and implications of the so-called ‘co-decision’ procedure, whereby EU ministers meeting in the European Council have a more or less equal say over decisions as the European Parliament. Those decisions which are not subject to co-decision are usually taken by the Council acting alone.

The Lisbon Treaty proposes to extend the use of the co-decision procedure to 40 more policy areas, so that just about all decisions made by the EU are decided jointly with the European Parliament (as oppposed to about 75% currently).

But the House of Lords report finds significant problems with exercising national parliamentary scrutiny of EU legislation under the co-decision procedure, which could be set to worsen if it is extended under Lisbon.

The report reads, “Should the Lisbon Treaty come into force, these difficulties will be magnified by the expansion of codecision into new areas: notably agriculture, fisheries and justice and home affairs.”

The report finds that, under co-decision, more and more legislative proposals are reaching a first-reading agreement in the European Parliament and Council, or an early second-reading agreement (as opposed to going to proper second and third readings). This reduces the amount of time that the legislative process takes, but also consequently reduces the (already meagre) amount of time that national parliaments have to scrutinise proposals and give their feedback to government ministers, in order to inform national positions on amendments and negotiations.

Even pro-Lisbon ex-MEP Richard Corbett (who gave evidence to the Committee) admitted that first reading agreements “limit” the “advantage” national Parliaments have, saying second and third reading agreements make Parliamentary scrutiny potentially easier.

‘Informal trilogue’

The report finds that, when first-reading agreements are reached, they are often the result of “informal trilogue” meetings which take place before the official readings, in order to negotiate an acceptable text. These trilogue meetings contain representatives from the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament. The French Deputy Permanent Representative to the EU who gave evidence to the committee said, “the real negotiation takes place in the trilogue” and the Lords committee says the use of these has increased to the point that they are now the primary form of negotiation between the European Parliament and the Council.

The problem is that, as the Lords report found: “informal trilogues, whilst helpful to expeditious agreement of legislation, make effective scrutiny of codecided legislation by national parliaments very difficult.”

If national Parliaments receive a Commission proposal, they may be scrutinising it while it is already being negotiated and amended by the Council and the EP. Unless national Parliaments receive up-to-date information about how the proposal is changing, scrutiny becomes even more of a redundant exercise, as it fails to reflect what the final outcome of the negotations will look like.

In that respect, the report is critical of both the Government’s track record in keeping Parliament in the loop about the development of EU proposals, and the speed of co-decision negotiations, which make updates difficult.

The Lords EU sub-Committee on environment and agriculture said that “the emerging consensus between the European Parliament and Council can be almost impossible to determine. Updates from the Government are usually too infrequent, and negotiations proceed too rapidly and opaquely for accurate tracking of the inter-institutional negotiations.”

The same sub-Committee also found that DEFRA was “sluggish” in providing updates on the progress of inter-institutional negotiations, sometimes giving them only when prompted. Notification on the Common Position (the Council’s position on the European Parliament’s amendments to a proposal) reached on the Plant Protection Products (Pesticides) Regulation was not received until three months after the vote in the Council. This particular proposal was modified in co-decision and subsequently became more controversial in its implications for the UK.

The report also cites the EU’s Climate Change Package as a prominent example of how early agreements are being sought on important, and controversial proposals, in order to push legislation through.

The report concludes that the expansion of the scope of the co-decision procedure and the use of these informal trilogues makes national Parliamentary scrutiny increasingly difficult.

Since this is exactly what Lisbon proposes to do, things can only get worse.

Sixteen Somalis drown making hazardous journey across Gulf of Aden

Sixteen Somalis died over the weekend trying to start fresh lives in Yemen, joining hundreds of others who have lost their lives this year making the perilous journey across the Gulf of Aden, the United Nations refugee agency reported today.

Northern Yemen’s humanitarian situation unravelling, warns UN refugee agency

Continuing clashes between Government forces and rebels have trapped civilians inside a city in northern Yemeni city, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported today, stressing that the humanitarian situation is deteriorating daily.

Secretary-General welcomes peaceful polls in Gabon

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has welcomed the peaceful presidential elections in Gabon, calling on the people of the African nation to continue supporting the democratic process.

South African Women Still Struggle For Equality

Women still struggle for equality

FARANAAZ PARKER | JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA
Sep 01 2009 06:00

Women are still as underrepresented in the labour force and in management positions as they were four years ago. This is according to the annual MasterCard Worldwide Index of Women’s Advancement, released earlier this month.

The survey showed that there has been little change in employment participation rates among men and women — about 48% of women are engaged in the labour force compared with 82% of men.

These numbers have remained fairly static with only about a 1% difference in the past four years. In Australia 69% of women participate in the labour force compared with 80% of men.

The reasons for women’s low employment in South Africa are multifaceted.

“The unemployment rate is much higher for women than it is for men. That in itself discourages women from joining the labour force,” said Dr Miriam Altman, executive director of the Centre for Poverty, Employment and Growth at the Human Sciences Research Council.

According to Altman, the chances of young South Africans finding a job are about 50-50, but the odds are even less for women, who face more barriers to finding work.

“Culturally, the expectation is that women will look after the children. About one-third of young women are HIV positive and a large proportion of women live in rural areas where there are fewer work opportunities,” she said.

Altman said that to improve women’s participation in the workforce, the country would need to encourage them to get into non-traditional work, raise education levels and improve healthcare.

For mothers leaving rural areas to find work, “we need to make it safer, easier and cheaper for women to integrate into the city,” she said.

Experts say that statistics on labour force participation can be skewed by increased unemployment rates — if men lose their jobs, women are seen to be making up a larger percentage of the labour force.

The number of women who have given up looking for work is not reflected and neither is whether women are employed in skilled or unskilled work.

Carlene van der Westhuizen, a senior researcher in the Development Policy Research Unit at the University of Cape Town, said a study carried out between 1994 and 2005 showed that women got slightly more than half of net new jobs created.

“But most of those jobs were low-skilled or unskilled — for example domestic work — so they didn’t necessarily benefit from skilled or semi-skilled jobs.”

For academics, a more accurate way of measuring women’s advancement in the economy is by looking at average earnings and the gender wage gap.

“Generally we’ve found that women earn less than men for the same kind of work,” Van der Westhuizen said.

Women already in the labour force struggle to make headway in their careers. The survey found that only about 36% of women worked in managerial positions.

This number has dropped is the past three years.

Dr Elaine Salo, director of the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Pretoria, said she suspects this may have something to do with the global economic downturn.

“There’s a gendered ideology in the world of work that still considers women as having increased employment risk,” she said.

Women are more likely to be accommodated when profit margins are high but when the financial climate cools employers tend to retain the men in their companies as they see women as carrying the “gendered risks” of getting married, getting pregnant or having to move for their families, Salo said.

South Africa needs to “play catch-up” when it comes to including women in the workplace, she said.

Oddly, women outstrip men when it comes to enrolment in tertiary education. The discrepancy between the percentage of women who study further and the percentage of women in management positions, though consistent with other countries surveyed, is glaring.

Altman said one reason for the discrepancy could be social — women often study for traditional roles such as nursing, psychology and other caring professions.

“They tend not to go into management-type jobs. They’ll become teachers or nurses. Degrees like commerce or engineering are more likely to lead to management positions,” she said.

Salo gave an alternative view: “It might be that women feel they need more skills to get the same jobs as men. It could also be that tertiary institutions are more sensitive to the need for equality [than businesses],” she said.

According to the World Economic Forum’s 2008 Global Gender Gap Report — which rates gender equality in terms of economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, health and survival — Norway, Finland and Sweden are the countries with the smallest gender gap overall.

Source: Mail & Guardian Online
Web Address: http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-09-01-women-still-struggle-for-equality

All women should be included

FARANAAZ PARKER - Aug 31 2009 06:00

Though the Broad-Based BEE Act definitively rules out white women as BEE beneficiaries, the question of whether they should be considered for affirmative action continues to spur debate.

Statistics show that women are underrepresented in the labour force and even more so higher up the career ladder.

In 2007 Jimmy Manyi, president of the Black Management Forum, caused waves when he said white women were overrepresented at executive levels and should be removed from the list of designated groups under the Employment Equity Act.

Earlier this year another controversy arose when former Absa chairperson Gill Marcus was named to replace Tito Mboweni as governor of the South African Reserve Bank at the end of the year.

Marcus, an ANC stalwart, is highly respected in financial circles and though her appointment is a first for women in the history of the bank, the news was overshadowed by a debate about “minorities” in the economic cluster.

Speaking to journalists after the announcement, ANC Youth League president Julius Malema said his organisation had expected “an African child to occupy that strategic position”.

But the position of the Businesswomen’s Association (BWA) has always been to “stand united” in the face of such debate. “The numbers speak for themselves — women are underrepresented. We cannot start talking about degrees of disadvantage because it becomes petty and it takes the debate backwards,” said BWA board member Kunyalala Maphisa, adding that it is possible to take cognisance of these degrees of disadvantage without excluding certain women.

According to Maphisa, the BWA census did not bear out Manyi’s assertion that white women are over- represented.“Besides, the issue self-corrects when you consider BEE. All these interventions should be taking place concurrently,” said Maphisa.

She said she was not surprised by the findings of the MasterCard index or that affirmative action has failed to help women advance in the workplace.

“There are two questions. First, is it being implemented correctly, and second, are women taking advantage of it? Affirmative action is about empowerment. If women don’t acquire the requisite skills and experience to hold management positions, it becomes lip service. “There’s a lack of commitment on the part of our male counterparts to ensure adequate mentorship and many women choose not to go the managerial route because the environment is hostile.”

Maphisa said a process of “collective engagement” is required to get men to appreciate the position of women in the workplace. “Women tend to discuss their problems among themselves. That for me counts as a monologue; what you want is a dialogue with men,” she said.

Maphisa said the inclusion of women in the workplace is a matter of policy and will. She pointed to government’s commitment to gender equality as an example of how gender-bias can be corrected.

The BWA’s 2009 census of women leaders in government, state-owned enterprises and JSE-listed companies shows that government is ahead when it comes to gender equity in the workplace.

Although women represent only 0.5% of senior management in government, they make up 55.5% of all government workers and 48.3% of highly skilled workers.

When it comes to women in leadership positions, state-owned enterprises outperform the private sector — women hold 40% of directorships in state-owned enterprises but only 13.2% of directorships in JSE-listed companies.

Source: Mail & Guardian Online
Web Address: http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-08-31-all-women-should-be-included

We celebrate otherness today

COLLEEN LOWE MORNA: COMMENT - Aug 31 2009 06:00

Long before the Caster Semenya sex-test row hit the headlines, South Africans in all their corners were questioning her identity.

Inevitably questions such as “would you want to be seen with her”, “would you marry her” and “she must be a lesbian” peppered conversation. It’s wonderful how the rainbow nation has rallied around its “golden girl”. But how deep, how broad, how far and for how long will this celebration of otherness last?

Remember, Semenya’s agony did not start with (though it will be considerably aggravated by) being thrust under the global media spotlight. It started with being a little girl who liked playing soccer in the dusty plains of Limpopo, who has been refused entry into public toilets and whose humiliation did not start in Berlin.

As I watched the headlines progress from “She’s a lady, man” and “Yes, she’s a girl” to “All black, all gold, she’s our girl”, I could not help but remember the story of Marco Ndlovu, one of many women who annually participate in workshops to chronicle their lives at Gender Links.

The following are a few lines from her testimony, written under the header “Finding the real me”: “I am a 39-year-old black lesbian born into to a family of eight, of whom only five survived. Gender violence has been so much a part of my life that at times I wonder if there is such a thing as a life free of violence.

“As a lesbian, hate, violence and misogyny follow me wherever I go. I became pregnant as a result of being raped by a man I believed to be a friend. I have been beaten almost to pulp because of my sexual orientation.

“I have a female lover, but since she is not ready to be open about our relationship, we have to keep it secret. While I look for whatever job I can get so that I can build a home for my children and grandchildren, I write poetry and create the world of my dreams with the words that flow from my pen.

I am Marco, a proud woman, who loves her two daughters, who loves other women, and who — despite the pain and suffering that I have endured — is finally finding the real me.”

I remembered Marco, because like Semenya she is athletic, muscular, flat-chested and could easily be mistaken for a man. Unlike Semenya, she will not have a hero’s welcome, meet the president or have the whole nation proclaim her right to be.

As we welcome Semenya home, it behoves us to ask how many others there are out there, men and women, who have refused to conform to societal templates, and whether we will stand up for them in the same way.

In the very same newspapers that have now shown us every angle of Semenya’s face, her facial hair, her crotch, her braided hair and her muscular body (whenever before has a woman athlete featured so prominently on the front page of any newspaper?), we have the obligatory blonde, blue-eyed, skinny pin-up girls from Planet Hollywood pasted on back pages.

On the same page heralding Semenya’s red-carpet welcome on Tuesday, one paper reported on Miss South Africa, Tatum Keshwar, saying she hopes she has done the nation proud by being selected seventh in the Miss Universe contest.

So now its official: women come in all shapes and forms. Why is that important? Because although sex is a biological given (though even that, we have learned, is far from straightforward), gender is a social construct: how society expects women and men to behave.

Precisely because girls are expected to be pretty faces with limited strength and thinking capacity, they retreat or are forced to retreat from sport, from public life, from hard beats in the media, from boardrooms and management, from entrepreneurship and jobs such as mining and security.

Stereotypes also limit men: they should not cry, feel, care or engage in “women’s work”. In the past several years we have been running a course called Business Unusual in different parts of Southern Africa.

In Tanzania we found Masai men making money by using their skill in braiding hair to run salons in a local market, describing how, by challenging their socialisation, they are doing a rip-roaring trade. Bravo to them.

Will women in South Africa, come the World Cup in 2010, get to play the game, drive taxis and build highways? If we fail to use this extraordinary event to breathe life into the celebration of diversity envisaged in the Constitution, our large turnout at Oliver Tambo Airport this week will have been little more than a fleeting show of national unity.

We will have raised a middle finger to the rest of the world but retreated into our cocoon of black and white, male and female — not the rainbow nation we claim to be. Unlike Marco, we will still not have found our true selves.

Colleen Lowe Morna is executive director of Gender Links.

Source: Mail & Guardian Online
Web Address: http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-08-31-we-celebrate-otherness-today