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Topic Discussion III
Participation in
Democratic Decision-Making:
The Vital Voices of Women, Civil Society and
Pluralism
Room 3
(14 of 16 pages)
Speaker: I am Manor Nadir. I am from Guyana. I am a Member of Parliament
and leader of my party. Two observations. One, with respect to civil society. I, like the member from Mali, do
have a problem with respect to where you draw the line distinguishing those in civil society from politics. Many
times I have found in our situation in Guyana, persons in civil society have a big voice; in fact they speak as
loudly as those who are elected, but then when you ask them to put themselves up for election, they don't want
to face the same tests as us, so we have to look and see what is the balance between civil society and time to
go for political representation.
Secondly, with respect to women's participation, as I listen to the delegates here, I feel we in Guyana are so
fortunate and I would just like to share our experience with women's participation. We have a very crude system
of proportional representation where the parties decide who sits in parliament to represent the seats which we
won. It has made good political sense for our parties to select a large number of women to parliament. In fact,
currently we have almost 30% of our parliament as women. Our President is a woman also and she was elected by the
largest majority. We have, as I said, good sense in our Consumers' Affairs Division. Two women lead Consumers'
Affairs in the country; women are dominating our legal profession today; the Chief Justice who is the second highest
luminary in Guyana, she's here at the conference, and of course she's a woman. And recently all parties in parliament
agreed to the establishment of a women's leadership institute to also take the issue of women's participation outside
of urban centers and also bring it to the rural women. Madame Chair, we men in Guyana sometimes think we're going
to be endangered shortly. As I said, the legal profession is dominated by women. A year ago I had a daughter who
graduated as a lawyer and last week she came home and said "Dad, you have the right to remain silent, so shut
up".
Thank you.
Chair: thank you very much. I will now give the floor to Madame Diare Dembele, to respond to a question
that has been asked and then I will summarize the session.
Diare Dembele: Two questions that were raised by my colleagues. The problem of quota. I personally am not
in favor of a quota, but the position of my NGO is that we must grant and give a quota because the social-cultural
obstacles impede the implementation of the Constitution, the legal measures which grant women all their political
rights. The international text, whether it be the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the UN Charter, grants
the same political rights to women as well as equality. A principle has been acquired a century ago, but in practice
women are absent, because the cultural obstacles under privilege them and then the rate of literacy is very high
among women.. Women of my generation, we are those who have escaped baby-sitting and those who had the opportunity
to go to school have to develop this by imposing the quota so that we can stand side by side with men and stand
by women in defense of women and this is the position of my association. I am against the quota.
As to frontiers between the associations and political [Inaudible]. This one should be clear and rigid. We have
a political personality and you adhere to your party and you solicit suffrage for this party, or you have a personality
of civic society and you do not support a political party. You are neutral. This is very clear and should help
us overcome this confusion. I thank you for your attention.
Chair: Thank you. We have exactly ten minutes so I'll try to be brief so that those who want to talk can
have at least one last chance to make their last comments after I finish.
I think we all seem to agree that participation is at the essence of democracy and most of the discussion has been
focused on two areas: one has been on the role of civil society and the other one relates to half of the population,
in particular, women. I will try now to address these issues within the context of the questions that were raised
earlier.
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