The first United Nations General Assembly special session on HIV/AIDS was plunged into disarray Monday by a filibuster by Muslim states over the participation of a gay and lesbian movement, said AFP.
A motion to allow Karyn Kaplan, of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, to take part in a roundtable on human rights was adopted by 62 votes to none after two and a half hours of debate.
Russia and Japan were among 30 countries that abstained from the vote, said the agency.
In a clear challenge to the assembly president, Harri Holkeri of Finland, most Islamic countries disassociated themselves from the process and refused to cast their votes.
"We have been on a road that will make working the UN more difficult than it is," South Africa's ambassador to the UN, Dumisani Kumalo, told delegates after the result was announced.
"This is a conference about people who are dying from HIV/AIDS," he said.
"The people who are dying are white people, black people, gay people, non-gay people, all people," he added.
"As victims of past discrimination in our country, we are very sensitive when people are being discriminated against, but this is not about discrimination," Kumalo said.
"This is about people who are dying of HIV/AIDS."
He appealed to each side not to question the other's motives.
Those who chose not to participate in the vote, like those who had voted, "are very good members of the United Nations," he said to loud applause.
The vote was called after repeated maneuverings by Islamic states to block a Canadian proposal to reinstate Kaplan's name on a list of roundtable speakers.
Holkeri recommended last week that Kaplan be allowed to join government delegates and others at Tuesday's roundtable, one of four scheduled for the three-day session.
But Kaplan, one of 700 non-government organization representatives accredited to the special session, was anonymously blackballed by 11 countries, the agency said.
In two and a half hours of procedural wranglings, not a single speaker explained why Kaplan should be barred from the roundtable, although Pakistan, for example, said more than once that it was acting on principle.
Delegates from Egypt, Malaysia, Pakistan and Sudan repeatedly questioned the quorum of the assembly and challenged Holkeri's rulings, some in terms that bordered on insolence.
A Libyan representative corrected Holkeri when the president referred to his country as the Libyan Republic, rather than the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, AFP said.
The Iraqi ambassador to the UN, Mohammed El Douri, asked for the floor to explain that, although his country has lost its vote in the General Assembly, if it were able to vote, it would have abstained.
Last week, Egypt, Libya, the US and the Vatican, among other countries, criticized the blunt language employed in a key UN document on AIDS.
Several government delegations, including those of the United States, Egypt, Libya, and the Vatican, were attempting to delete from the draft declaration any mention of the fact that groups at particularly high risk of HIV infection are men having sex with men, sex workers and their clients, and injecting drug users and their sex partners.
In language agreed to by Canada, Australia, and several Latin American and European countries, the draft declaration makes explicit the goal of reducing incidence among "men who have sex with men, sex workers, [and] injecting drug users and their sexual partners," as well as prisoners and refugees.
The United States proposes striking this list and replacing it with the vague phrase "vulnerable individuals," including those engaging in "risky sexual behavior." The Vatican prefers a similarly euphemistic reference to "people who have multiple sex partners." Egypt suggests substituting the judgmental phrase, "homosexuality among men, prostitution, and other forms of irresponsible sexual behavior." - Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
