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Topic Discussion III
Participation in
Democratic Decision-Making:
The Vital Voices of Women, Civil Society and
Pluralism
Room 4
(17 of 20 pages)
Chair: Thank you for those comments and I applaud you for the advancements
you have made in El Salvador and let's think of partnership here and working together and not saying who began
what. Let's just deal with where we are today and move forward. I would like to talk to you afterwards as to how
you made such remarkable advancements for women. How? We'll do it afterwards and put it in the minutes of the session.
Speaker: I'm not going to talk about only Yemen, because the situation of Yemen was covered fully by my
colleagues, but I'm going to raise only one point, that women in Yemen have proven that they are up to any responsibility
and that they can run any office within government or a top post. I wanted to talk about our distinguished speaker,
but because she is with us now, she is a living example of the success stories of Yemeni women. In her work in
the Information Ministry she supported law and good work regardless of the political direction. In fact, when she
left the Ministry, our party received a letter from the Ministry threatening us with closing our newspaper. That
is one of the examples of how she used to defend us and how much we lost because she left the Ministry. The problem
is not with women but with the traditions that we are suffering from. In fact, what our friends and colleagues
here also talk about, civic education, education should not be directed to women to tell her of her rights, but
to society at large because the problem does not lie mainly with women.
There is another recommendation that we still have a problem with in the emerging democracies. We should allocate
a specific percentage of seats in the parliament. We should not adhere to it religiously, no, but this could be
the minimum. We could have even more seats for women, or occupied by women in the parliament, but at least we should
have a minimum to guarantee that women are represented in our parliament and that they are practicing their rights.
Not only at the level of parliament, but at the level of political parties and NGOs. In Yemen, the law said that
if you want to start a party, you should have at least 250 party members. I do believe that most of the parties
in Yemen, if not all, do have some names of women, but in reality most of those names are for men and not for women
and we don't have even 2% of the members of parties who are women. So those parties should be obliged to have at
least a minimum number of women members so that we can really represent all sectors of society. This is a second
recommendation that I wanted to make.
One of the questions that was put forward is "What are the reforms that we can carry out to support rural
women or poor women?" I do believe that the emerging democracies should facilitate popular participation in
decision making so that even people in rural areas should have the choice of who would represent them or who would
run their interest in the government or in the local administration so that women could have a say in the decision
making and could monitor the government. This is one of the recommendations again that I would like to make. We
should have this mechanism so that all citizens, men and women, could be really involved in the decision making
process and in choosing their representatives.
Another point; When it comes to the appropriate channels for civil society, first of all I wanted to make this
recommendation, that our countries should facilitate the establishment of real NGOs, without any interference from
the government, so that whether through legislation or through guarantees, those NGOs would survive and would always
be independent and have a say in decision making in the country. Thank you.
Chair: Thank you for your marvelous intervention, especially when it comes to the facilitation of the establishment
of NGOs and their presence in society. Now our friend from Nepal, please.
Mme. Sahana Prachan: I am Sahana Prachan from Nepal. I'll try to be very brief. We Nepalese don't have a
different story from the rest of the world. We have the same story, with a slight difference. Three sisters have
given a very good picture. They are more or less the same in our country also.
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