UN Cuts, WHO Guidance & Family Values Conference

United Nations

🗞 UN Secretary General Announces Major Reforms to Cut UN Spending. During a special address on Monday, and in light of a salient liquidity and identity crisis, Secretary-General António Guterres announced his plans to simplify UN procedures, eliminate overlap, and cut spending. Guterres discussed a 20% reduction in posts across several departments, the closing of several buildings, and the merging of UN agencies, among other proposals. During the meeting, a U.S. representative suggested that the UN go back to its “principled purpose,” which could mean to focus primarily on peace and security and development issues, while leaving the highly controversial and even costlier “human rights” agenda behind. António Guterres responded by saying that this reform process is not a process of “going back to the basics” and that human rights, including the gender strategies, “will be preserved." The US has recently criticized UNICEF and other UN agencies for mainstreaming a controversial gender ideology agenda across their programming. African countries asked the Secretary-General to ensure the UN will continue to carry out development work in the Global South.

🗞 UN Uses AI to Target Adolescents on Controversial Issues “Under the guise of tackling “misinformation,” UN agencies are using AI to spy on adolescent attitudes toward contraception, abortion access, and sexual identity in the global south and target them with information that will change their views on these topics.” Read more here.

🗞 Egypt Flags Bias Against Conservative Groups at Feminist Conference. As member states met to discuss ways to improve and revitalize the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), a multi-week women’s rights annual conference, Egypt voiced concerns about discrimination against groups whose ideas “are outside the mainstream.” Egypt said it is worrying to hear that some groups were “denied the ability to get access to the UN and host events.” During the last CSW, pro-life groups were denied the opportunity to make statements during the civil society section of the plenary. Representatives of pro-life groups were also denied entry to some parallel events for their conservative views on life and family.

🗞 New WHO guidelines on preventing adolescent pregnancies. The most recent WHO recommendations on how to best prevent adolescent pregnancies focuses almost entirely on the promotion of contraceptive use among adolescents. The guidelines mention that "[p]olitical, governmental, religious, traditional and other influential leaders should be mobilized to support the access to, uptake of, and continued use of contraception among adolescents," and that laws and policies on age and consent in relation to sexual activity should be “ formulated and implemented to improve access to, uptake of, and continued use of contraception among adolescents.” The guidelines do not discuss abstinence programs as a solution to preventing adolescent pregnancies.  

International

🗞 Pan-African Conference on Family Values Opens in Kenya with Call to ‘fight for’ Family Institution ‘without apology’ “In her address during the opening ceremony of the May 12-17 conference in Kenya, which members of the Africa Christian Professionals Forum (ACPF) organized, the Chairperson of ACPF emphasized the importance of the family institution as the foundation of society, describing it as “a precious institution that must be protected and promoted by all.” You can read the report on the conference here. 

Opinion

🗞 The Trump administration’s big opportunity “The United Nations had a busy spring. The 69th annual session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) met in March. In April, the 58th annual session of the UN Commission on Population and Development (CPD) followed. As always, these events exemplified the UN’s strong push to anchor, by hook or by crook, the secularist West’s post-Christian moral orthodoxy in international law. But this year the United States might have succeeded in initiating a complete reversal of the UN’s new human rights agenda. Todd Huizinga, a U.S. diplomat from 1992 to 2012, weighs in on the topic.