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Topic Discussion III
Participation in
Democratic Decision-Making:
The Vital Voices of Women, Civil Society and
Pluralism
Room 5
(18 of 22 pages)
Chair: Thank you very much. We have until 3:45, so we have about another
20 minutes. I want to turn to our next speaker. But what I'd like people to really focus on in the last few minutes
of the discussion are some practical proposals or -- now, we have identified some very interesting areas. We've
talked about the importance of the role of law. Some of our speakers have talked about the importance of decentralization
as a possible mechanism for enhancing participation. We've talked about the importance of freedom of expression.
We've talked about some of the politics of the interaction between non-governmental organizations and government
and I'm thinking of the comment from our colleague from Guyana in addressing specifically the concern of fear,
because again, we've talked about this role of fear. There's point in talking about participation if people are
afraid. What are some concrete strategies that can help people to deal with these issues? And again, with respect
to women, our colleague from Malawi, Lily Kapanda, has made a very interesting point about the capacity of women
to get together and conquer. And incidentally, this is something that goes on in mature democracies, as well.
But it would be very helpful if we could begin to focus, because we want the outcome of these discussions to be
reflected in the declaration tomorrow. So we've had a very good discussion of some of the barriers and there have
been some suggestions, but if we could think concretely about solutions to problems and even small things or even
something that maybe your country tried and it didn't work, but so that we can in the ultimate declaration, provide
some shared wisdom that people can go forward with, not just the participants in the conference, but also the organizations,
whether it's the Canadian International Development Agency or NDI or any of the other groups who are very committed
to supporting democratization, what lessons we might learn from your own experiences.
So on that note, I'll turn to this last gentleman here and ask you in the last 20 minutes that we have, to try
and be as solution oriented as you can be, because we have a fairly clear view of where we are in terms of the
problems. Just go ahead and introduce yourself.
Speaker: Thank you, Madam Chairperson. My name is Agei Herowoni (ph), a journalist from Yemen, a representative
of the Elhaq party, which is a party in opposition. At the beginning, I'd like to commend on what Dr. Raufa Hassan
said and I will explain when it comes to the nomination and the election in women -- I expected Dr. Hassan to speak
of this. El Haq (ph) party is one of the parties in Yemen that comes from religious Islamic origins and this party
nominated a woman in support for the right of women for nomination for the parliament, at a time when there was
some problems in accepting the women as a voter, not as a candidate for parliament. I want to say that we don't
mean to have women as decoration in our party. We want actual participation. I think that the woman is taking part
seriously and I think that we will have better results through having such active participation.
When the parties do the nominations, they don't receive funds for example, but some parties which are in power
do receive some funds, but other parties do not have such financial support. And of course, this effects negatively.
The intention of this party is to support women. Some of these parties try to support the activities of women and
they try -- we don't see such activities, for example, where -- in the past elections, for example, we found that
the societies do help the ruling parties, rather than helping the societies and the idea was, in order to support
the women, the powerful party or the strong party do not go into competition where there is representation of small
parties. So that was an issue during the competition in the past elections.
So we can see that there is a problem in accepting the woman as a candidate for the parliament. There are two women
members and they were nominated in the civil society districts or provinces. But this is not our orientation and
this is not the tendency. We know that other parties which do need to accept the right of women to become members,
so we want to say that the woman should have her right in the powerful parties, because they have the capability
of nominating women as members in these parties.
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