Bahá’í World/Volume 28/The Bahá’í International Community, Activities 1999-2000

The Bahá’í World
Volume 28

THE Bahá’í

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY

Activities 1999—2000

'I’he Bahá’í International Community both encompasses and represents, at the United Nations and in other international fora, the more than five million Bahá’ís living in at 1east235 countries and dependent territories around the world. Its 181 national and regional affiliates are engaged in a wide range of activities aimed at realizing the Bahá’í Faith’s central principles of peace and justice. For the last several years, four major themes—human rights, moral development, the advancement of women, and global prosperity—have shaped the Bahá’í International Community’s activities at the local, national, and international levels.

The Bahá’í International Community’s United Nations Office and its Office of Public Information play complementary roles in the promotion of this work. The United Nations Office, with over fifty years of experience offering Bahá’í perspectives on global issues and supporting UN programs, has in recent years significantly increased efforts aimed at assisting its national affiliates to influence relevant programs and developments in their countries. The Office of Public Information, Which also represents

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the Bahá’í community internationally, disseminates information about the Bahá’í Faith around the world, oversees production of the award—winning newsletter One Country, and maintains the official Web site of the Bahá’í International Community.

United Nations

F irst affiliated with the UN in 1947, the Bahá’í International Community has long supported the work of the United Nations. As an international non-governmental organization (NGO) at the UN, the BIC was granted consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in 1970, with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 1976, and with the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in 1989. A working relationship with the World Health Organization (WHO) was also established in 1989. The BIC has United Nations Offices in New York and Geneva and maintains representations to United Nations regional commissions in Addis Ababa, Bangkok, and Santiago, and to UN offices in Nairobi, Rome, and Vienna. Its Office of the Environment (established in 1988), and its Office for the Advancement of Women (established in 1992) function as adjuncts of its United Nations Office. Over the course of the last decade, the Bahá’í International Community’s United Nations Office has increasingly encouraged its national affiliates to expand their involvement in the work of the United Nations.

Human Rights Education initiative

As National Spiritual Assemblies have assumed a greater role in Bahá’í diplomatic work, many have joined in a global campaign to encourage active engagement in the UN Decade for Human Rights Education (1995—2004). To promote this Human Rights Education initiative, the Bahá’í International Community’s United Nations Office developed a training program for national Bahá’í communities. Ninety—nine Of the National Spiritual Assemblies that have chosen to participate in this global campaign sent representatives to one of fourteen regional diplomatic training sessions held between October 1998 and November 1999.

Seminars were offered in Australia, Cameroon, Colombia, Costa Rica, Céte d’Ivoire, Denmark, Romania, Thailand,

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Participants in a human rights education training session in Trinidad.

‘ 1/ Trinidad and Tobago, the Ukraine, the United States, and Uruguay. Materials were made available in English, French, Russian and Spanish, and at least one training session was offered in each of those languages. Moreover, the training sessions themselves were highly participatory, encouraging trainees to draw on their personal experience and to explore how to identify and apply relevant spiritual principles to diplomatic situations they encounter in their own countries.

Following the seminars, the trained external affairs representatives briefed their National Spiritual Assemblies on what they had learned in order to help develop national plans for promoting the Decade for Human Rights Education. Many of these same trainees have also begun offering the training to others, thereby systematically increasing the human resources available to carry out diplomatic initiatives at national, regional, and local levels. The United Nations Office is supporting this work with a Human Rights Education Newsletter and a Human Rights Education CD-ROM.

Human rights

The Bahá’í International Community’s support for the UN Decade for Human Rights Education is a natural extension of its efforts since 1947 to promote human rights and responsibilities as the foundation for a peaceful, prosperous, and sustainable world order. This year, as in years past, the Bahá’í International Community addressed the UN Commission on Human Rights. Its statement on the right to education was circulated as an official UN document (E/CN.4/2000/NGO/ 13) in English, French, and

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Spanish to the F ifty—sixth Session of the Commission, held MarchApril 2000.1 The BIC also joined other NGOs in signing joint statements on violence against women, human rights defenders, and the right to education. Preparations are also being closely monitored for the next major UN human rights conference, the World Conference against Racism, to be held in South Africa in September 2001.

Protecting the right of Bahá’ís throughout the world to practice their faith is also an important aspect of the work of the Bahá’í International Community’s United Nations Office, and a major focus of the office in Geneva. With the help of its national affiliates, the BIC has, for more than twenty years, brought the perilous situation of the Bahá’ís in Iran to the attention of the international community, providing reliable information to national governments aria to the UN offices, commissions, and committees that monitor compliance with the various UN human rights agreements. During the Commission’s deliberations on human rights in Iran, the BIC offered an oral update on the situation of the Bahá’ís in that country.2 It also monitored sessions of the ECOSOC and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, where it was anticipated that the issue of the Bahá’ís might be raised.

Advancement ofwomen

F ifiy—two national Bahá’í communities now have Offices for the Advancement of Women, and numerous others have committees or task forces. These offices assist National Spiritual Assemblies in their efforts to promote the full participation of women both in the life of the Bahá’í community and in the world at large. They are kept abreast of initiatives at the UN, opportunities for regional involvement, and projects being carried out by other national communities through a newsletter circulated by the Bahá’í International Community’s Office for the Advancement of Women.

' For the Bahá’í International Community’s statement on the right to education, see pp. 2957300. 3 For the Bahá’í International Community’s statement on the current situation of the Bahá’ís in Iran, see pp. 291794. For additional information, see the article on pp. 157764.

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Throughout this year, the Office has been engaged in a variety of activities pertaining to women and girls. At the ‘request of African Action on AIDS, an organization dedicated to providing for AIDS orphans in Africa, the Bahá’í International Community cohosted a program at its New York office entitled “Celebrating Human Rights by Promoting the Rights of AIDS Orphans.” This program honored the president of the Fiftyfourth Session of the General Assembly, Dr. Theo-Ben Gurirab of Namibia, and his wife for their support of this cause. In October 1999 a Millennium Young People’s Congress was held in Honolulu, Hawaii, sponsored by Peace Child International, the State of Hawaii, UNEP, and UNESCO. At the Congress, the Bahá’í International Community, which has become known as an advocate for the girl child, was invited to serve as one of several mentors for teens from 110 countries. The Community also convened the Advocates for African Food Security: Lessening the Burden for Women, as it has since 1988.

At the March 2000 session of the Commission on the Status of Women, the Bahá’í International Community continued to exercise leadership in the NGO community. It Chaired two important groups for the NGO Committee on the Status of Women: the Flaming Group for NGO Consultation Day and the Task F orce on National Mechanisms for the Advancement of Women. Speaking on a panel entitled “NGOs for Women 2000: Setting Targets for Beijing + 5,” which was organized prior to the Commission by the UN Division for the Advancement of Women, the director of the Office for the Advancement of Women shared her expertise on national machinery for the advancement of women. After surveying the progress various countries had made in establishing mechanisms to ensure that the concerns ofwomen would be taken into account in decision making at every level of government, she focused primarily on constructive examples of countries whose national mechanisms are working. The issue of national mechanisms for ensuring equality was just one of the twelve issues addressed during the eleven days of the March 2000 session of the Commission on the Status of Women, during which

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governments prepared for the upcoming special session of the UN General Assembly. “Beijing + 5,” as the special session is called, will evaluate progress in implementing the platform for action adopted in 1995 at the Fourth World Conference on Women.

At the request of UNIFEM, the Bahá’í International Community and the NGO Committee on UNIFEM cohosted two receptions for the UN committee monitoring implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). A number of UN officials and diplomats were among the approximately sixty-five guests Who attended the first reception and the eighty who attended the second.

Participants in the World Faiths Development Dialogue, held in Washington, DC, November 1999.

Environment, development, and globalprosperity

For the last two years the Bahá’í International Community has participated in the World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD), sponsored by the president of the World Bank and the archbishop of Canterbury. The second formal session of the Dialogue was held in Washington, DC, in November 1999. Participants from the first WFDD held at Lambeth Palace met at World Bank Headquarters to review progress made by the Dialogue since its inception in February 1998. The historic Lambeth Palace gathering brought together development experts and spiritual leaders from nine major religions for two days of consultation on the relationship between material and spiritual development. The Washington conference drew many of the same high-level participants as the

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Lambeth Palace event, as well as the executive director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to consider an overview of development work involving the World Bank and faith communities and to discuss the future of the Dialogue.

Consultations, which centered largely on spiritual values, produced a remarkable consensus around many principles central to the Bahá’í understanding of development. Trustworthiness and honesty were repeatedly mentioned as foundations for development. The need to work for global solidarity, for recognition of the unity of the human family, and for a global ethic was highlighted again and again. Representatives of the World Bank and the IMF, in their public remarks, also spoke of spiritual values as being at the heart of development. Indeed, recognition of the need to end the artificial separation between material and spiritual development appears to be growing, as evidenced by the continued attention in development circles being given to the Bahá’í statement Valuing Spirituality in Development, which was prepared for the Lambeth Palace event.3

Participants agreed that the Dialogue should continue for the next five years at least and that the IMF should become a partner in it. A team of independent advisers will make recommendations to the cochairs and the WFDD executive committee regarding the future coordinating structure of the Dialogue, and the high-level group attending these first two meetings will meet again within the next two years.

Yet another significant interfaith activity was the third session of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, held in Cape Town, South Africa, in December 1999.4 A representative of the Bahá’í International Community participated in drafting A Call to Our Guiding Institutions, the central document of the Parliament, and was one of nine Bahá’ís accredited to the three-day high level Parliament Assembly. The Bahá’í International Community was also represented in Amman, J ordan, at the Seventh World Assembly Of the World Conference on Religion and Peace.

3 See The Bahá’í World 1997798, pp. 233!59 for the full text. 4 For more information on the Parliament, see pp. 105—10.

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Secretmy—genera/ Of the BIC, Albert Lincoln, greeting Pope John Paul [I in Tel Aviv, during the pope 3‘ historic visit [0 Israel in March 2000.

F uture of the United Nations

In preparation for the Millennium Assembly—as the year 2000 UN General Assembly session has been designated—and its Millennium Summit of heads of state and government, the NGO community has been organizing its own Millennium Forum to be held at UN Headquarters in New York in May 2000. The goal of the Forum is to give organizations of civil society the opportunity to articulate a new Vision for the future of the United Nations and for ways whereby the peoples of the world can participate effectively in global decision making. The Bahá’í International Community, as cochair of the organizing committee for the Millennium Forum, has been immersed throughout this year in a process intended to bring as many as fourteen hundred representatives of NGOs and other groups of civil society to the United Nations in May 2000.

Meetings

The Bahá’í International Community chaired three NGO committees and task forces this year: the NGO committees on UNIFEM, Freedom of Religion or Belief, and Human Rights; and the NGO task force on National Machinery for Gender Equality. Other meetings and UN sessions monitored by the Bahá’í International Community this year included the Eighth Session of the Commission on Sustainable Development; the Thirty—eighth Session of the Commission for Social Development; the Twentyeighth Session of the Economic Commission for Latin America

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and the Caribbean; the Substantive Session of the ECOSOC; the Second Preparatory Committee for the Special Session of the General Assembly, “World Summit for Social Development + 5”; a high-level meeting of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific to review implementation in Asia and the Pacific of the Beijing Platform for Action; the Fifty—fifth Session of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination; the Twenty-first and Twenty-second Sessions of the CEDAW; the Fifty-second World Health Assembly; the first planning meeting of the Fourth World Youth Forum of the United Nations System; meetings of the UNICEF executive board; and the Executive Committee Of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) Program.

Public Information

Based at the Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa, Israel, with a bureau in Paris, the Bahá’í International Community’s Office of Public Information coordinates and stimulates public information work throughout the worldwide Bahá’í community.

During 1999—2000 the Office facilitated more than two hundred visits of some 2,500 people from eighty countfies in its special visits program. Among the visitors were ambassadors from Australia, China, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Myanmar, Lithuania, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand, and Uzbekistan.

Also visiting were the first lady of Kazakhstan; a member of Parliament from Spain; the titular archbishop of Belcastro; the

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' A gl'irech '99 exhibition visiting the Terraces of i the Shrine Q/"the Báb in Haifa, September

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state secretary of the Ministry of F oreign Affairs in Hungary; the ministers of tourism from J ordan and Israel; Shimon Peres, former prime minister of Israel; four of Israel’s Knesset members; the president and members of the Faculty Senate from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The agriculture exhibition Agritech ’99 brought a delegation of approximately 240 dignitaries, including ministers and deputy ministers of Agriculture from more than thirty-five countries.

Film crews, reporters, and photographers representing national and local media from Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the Ukraine, and the United States Visited. Resulting coverage included a thirty-minute documentary entitled “On the Way to the Land of Unity—the Bahá’í Religion,” shown on German public television, channel Siidwestrundfunk; an article in Eden, a gardens magazine published and distributed in Germany; a segment on Dutch television entitled “Y2K News”; brief segments showing images of the Bahá’í gardens for a millennium television program that was broadcast throughout the world; and a program on Israel’s National Geographic Channel.

The Bahá’í World Web site,5 now in its fourth year, has experienced a four—fold increase in Visits since its launch, and at the end of 1999 averaged approximately 25,000 visits per month. The site is now available in five languages, with the addition ofArabic this year, and there are plans for additional languages.

The Paris branch of the Office of Public Information was active in support of the Royaumont Process, which was initiated by the European Union to promote stability and good relations between countries in South Eastern Europe.6 Training seminars were held in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Macedonia (FYROM), and Romania in 1999. Close and continuous communication was maintained with the representatives of the government of Luxembourg and the office of the EU for the Royaumont Process. In

5 The URL for the Bahá’í World Web site is <www.bahai.0rg> " See The Bahá’í World 1998—99, pp. 145—50 for a full report on the Bahá’í International Community’s involvement in the Royaumont Process.

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In September 1999, parlicipants in a rraim’n g seminar in Sarajevo created and

A : peljfbrmed a dramatic

‘ sketch about inlerct/mic tensions.

October 1999, the Romanian Ministry of Education officially adopted “The Happy Hippo Show”7 as part of a pilot program implemented in three school districts of Bucharest, with the possibility of extension to other cities.

The Bahá’í community in the Netherlands and the European Bahá’í Youth Council, in collaboration with the Office of Public Information in Paris, actively participated in The Hague Appeal for Peace Conference held in The Hague, Netherlands, from 11 to 15 May 1999, marking the hundredth anniversary of the first conference held in the same city. The Bahá’ís made a presentation that featured a short video highlighting the aims and purpose of the project “Promoting Positive Messages Through the Media: The Happy Hippo Show” and its implementation in Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, and Slovenia. Ayoung Croatian Bahá’í radio journalist, Robert Zuber, together with a representative of OPI Paris, cohosted a live adaptation of his weekly radio broadcast—a “Happy Hippo Show” devoted to the subject of multiculturalism.

One Country, the quarterly newsletter of the BIC, reached an estimated 50,000 subscribers in its eleventh year of operation. It is published in six languages and is circulated in more than 180 countries, with an electronic edition available on the World Wide Webf" Its coverage this year included a profile of the Kalimani

7 For more information on the Royaumont Process and “The Happy Hippo Show," see The Bahá’í World 1998~99, pp. 145—50. 8 The URL for the One Count/jv Web site is <www.onecountry.org>

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Women’s Group, which exercised skills of consultation and partnership to build a water storage system in an arid region of Kenya; the Uganda Bahá’í Institute for Development, which trained community health volunteers and helped to significantly increase immunization rates and raise awareness of basic hygiene in the Kumi and Soroti regions of southern Uganda; the STAR project in the United States, which offers a motivational athletic program and after—school tutorial sessions aimed at empowering and uplifting African American youth; and the Oedi Sewing Club in Botswana, a program that trains mostly poor single mothers in a marketable skill. One Country also continued to profile Bahá’í involvement in maj or international conferences such as the F ortythird Session of the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations, the Parliament ofWorld’s Religions, and the preparatory meetings for the Millenium Forum.

Conclusion

During 1999—2000, the Bahá’í International Community continued to encourage national support of the UN Decade for Human Rights Education around the world, promoted the advancement of women, encouraged the application of spiritual principles in development, and sought to promote the voice of civil society at the United Nations. In its work with National Spiritual Assemblies around the world, the United Nations, and other NGOs, the BIC continued to pursue its goal of the establishment of a just, peaceful, and prosperous civilization for all humankind.

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