The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) released a statement Monday night summarising a report that the organisation had released on Sunday in a press conference attended by a number of UN bodies’ representatives in Cairo and figures of civil society.
Dr Nahla Abd El-Tawab, the Population Council Country officer and Dr Hala El-Damanhoury, a reproductive health consultant spoke at the event.
The report, titled “Reclaiming and Redefining Rights”, was released on the 20th anniversary of the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo in 1994. There, conference delegates reached a consensus over four main goals: universal education; the reduction of infant and child mortality; the reduction of maternal mortality; and access to reproductive and sexual health services, including family planning.
The report evaluates the progress and commitment made by six countries in the region to achieve the goals of the Program of Action, which was launched in 1994 during the ICPD and ends in 2014. The six countries are: Egypt, Kuwait, Yemen, Palestine, Turkey and Tunisia.
The statement mentioned that the report is based on empirical data collected from various United Nations bodies and the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) on the six countries subject to research.
A wide range of qualitative studies, human rights reports, quantitative statistics and data, as well as several interviews with activists and NGOs were conducted.
The report was concluded with policy recommendations on reproductive and sexual rights and was divided to three main sections.
The first covered the status of women’s rights and health expenditure. The second section used reproductive health indicators to measure the status of maternal care, abortion, fertility and family planning and reproductive cancers. The third section, meanwhile, examines the states’ protection of sexual rights by monitoring sexuality education, sexually transmitted infections, HIV, early marriage, human trafficking and gender based violence in the six countries.
