Beijing Platform for Action. Chapter IV: Strategic Objectives and Actions – Paragraph 143(a)-(b)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/07
Strategic objective E.2.
Reduce excessive military expenditures and control the availability of armaments
Actions to be taken
143. By Governments:
a. Increase and hasten, as appropriate, subject to national security considerations, the conversion of military resources and related industries to development and peaceful purposes;
b. Undertake to explore new ways of generating new public and private financial resources, inter alia, through the appropriate reduction of excessive military expenditures, including global military expenditures, trade in arms and investment for arms production and acquisition, taking into consideration national security requirements, so as to permit the possible allocation of additional funds for social and economic development, in particular for the advancement of women;
Beijing Declaration (1995)
Paragraph 143 deals with the oft-mentioned issue in the modern period for the need, absolute necessity, of the reduction in the number of armaments found in the world in the current moment with the ongoing and continuous murder of innocents, destruction of national infrastructure, and subsequent scattering of individual citizens around the world as refugees and displaced persons, which, as has also been mentioned, are majoritively women and girls.
Another issue dealt here is the problem of the violation of women and girls & their rights. The rights of women, and by some implication girls, have been and will remain the central focus of this extensive, casual, and often tiresome and tedious series – woe be to the one who happens to read through the complete set of the materials. But onwards!
The focus on military is non-trivial, not for the focus on the med who defend and assault countries but on the majority of the resultant refugees as women and children. In other words, those who are most often not implicated – granted, due to the draft and cultural and economic coercion – in the wars become some of the largest recipients of the negative impacts of them. Non-combatants get killed and become refugees, or can be subject to rape as a weapon of war.
The focus or the charge here is the emphasis on the governments of the world to “increase and hasten” efforts for the work to prevent damage to the security of Member States of the United Nations while also working to make the military-industrial complexes into ones of development of peace, i.e., to turn swords into ploughshares. To discard old wisdom can be foolhardy, and for fools, sometimes, it is wrong; other times, it is bang on, here it is substantially correct.
The second paragraph here, or (b), stipulates the undertaking of exploratory measures in order gender both private and public capital – “inter alia” is simply arrogant academic-speak for “among other things,” obviously formally and institutionally educated classes wrote this (and other) document(s), i.e., the simply finding out how to make more money through the private industry or the public institutions – just make money.
The issue is not military expenditures, exactly, but more oriented around the excessive amounts, of whom the most egregious at this time is the United States – bloated. However, and correctly according to the framers of this document, the global military budget, not simply the United States, is a rather buffoonish affair well beyond reasonable nuclear capacity, for one.
There should be less trade in arms, in militarized investment, and simply work towards non-acquisition beyond peace-keeping limits. However, of course, the Mafia Principle of much of world affairs can make this difficult, as the most powerful can tend to flout the international law and breach norms, rather regularly in fact – to an almost comical degree.
The nature of a military expenditure for the enduring peace desired by non-warmongers, lunatics, or psychopaths, is for national security and the assistance in the case of outbreak of war and then the instantiation and maintenance of peace with the resultant leftover finances reinvested into long-term development and peace projects.
Next!
–(Updated 2018-11-10, only use the updated listing, please) One can find similar statements in other documents, conventions, declarations and so on, with the subsequent statements of equality or women’s rights:
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Preamble, Article 16, and Article 25(2).
- Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960) in Article 1.
- The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) in Article 3, Article 7, and Article 13.
- International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).
- Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979).
- Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984).
- The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and the optional protocol (1993).
- Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995), Five-year review of progress (2000), 10-year review in 2005, the 15-year review in 2010, and the 20-year review in 2015.
- United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000), and the UN Security Council additional resolutions on women, peace and security: 1820 (2008), 1888 (2009), 1889 (2009), 1960 (2010), 2106 (2013), 2122 (2013), and 2242 (2015).
- Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (2000).
- The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa or the “Maputo Protocol” (2003).
- Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence or the Istanbul Convention (2011) Article 38 and Article 39.
- UN Women’s strategic plan, 2018–2021
- 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
- 2015 agenda with 17 new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (169 targets for the end to poverty, combatting inequalities, and so on, by 2030). The SDGs were preceded by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) from 2000 to 2015.
–Human Rights
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