BEIJING (Reuter) Sept 14 - International human rights campaigners said thursday the world women's conference and its blueprint for action would provide new tools to curb rights abuses around the world. "The Platform for Action includes a commitment from the governments to extend protection of the human rights of women activists around the world," Amnesty International general secretary Pierre Sane told reporters.
"We will see over the next five years what actions concretely the governments will take to make sure that it is implemented," he said.
Sane said implementation would depend on pressure from non-governmental organizations such his London-based group, which was allowed to make its first formal visit to China for the United Nations conference.
He acknowledged the improvement in the lives of Chinese people and said he appreciated the hard-won chance to visit, but faulted the communist government for spurning his appeals for talks on prisoners of conscience and victims of torture.
"Progress has been made in moving toward freedom from want, but freedom from fear is still not a right of the Chinese people," he said. "What we want we will not get overnight."
Sane urged Beijing to free activist Ding Zilin and her husband, detained after demanding a full, impartial accounting of those killed in the June 1989 crushing of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, including their teenage son.
Amnesty adopted 12 women or groups of women it said were victims of human rights abuses to coincide with the conference and hass been demanding their rights.
Amnesty spokesman Casey Kelso tried to deliver a Petition to China on two women prisoners, journalist Gao Yu, 51, jailed last year on charges of leaking state secrets, and Tibetan nun Phuntsog Niydrou, to Foreign Ministry spokesman Chen Jian after a regular news briefing in Beijing.Chen refused.
When Kelso then tried to hold an impromptu news conference, managers at the Beijing International Club switched off the lights and turned on music in the hall.
Delegates from 189 countries were battling behind closed doors over the final wording of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which will form a blueprint for women's activism into the next century.
Although much of debate focused on the strength of language protecting human rights, activists were pleased that human rights had shifted to center stage, even among states often accused of limiting them. "There is an inexorable, irreversible trend now that women's human rights are part of the dialogue and that those rights are ever more precise," said Odile Sidem-Ponlain, head of the International Federation of Human Rights in Paris.
She cited many gains in the Beijing documents, including expression of a woman's right to control and decide her sexuality and reproduction and bold condemnation of violence against women whether in the home or as a weapon of war.
Binaifer Nowrojee of Human Rights Watch said she was pleased to see the Vatican trying to defend its opposition to sexual rights by citing from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights rather than the Bible.
Nowrojee said she hoped this signalled that states were gradually accepting universal human rights as a norm rather than a condition subject to cultural or religious differences.
"Culture and religion must not be used as excuses to commit female gender mutilation, honor killings of women suspected of adultery or stonings or throwing acid in the face of women who don't wear a veil," she said.
Activists said they hoped Chinese participants had gained some respect for their work to assure human rights for people everywhere.
"I'm very glad that this conference happened in China," said Sophia Woodman, the lone campaigner from the Human Rights in China group granted a visa to attend.
"The arrival of the NGO movement in China, however constrained, has to have had some effect," she said. "Some people now know that my job as a human rights worker is to talk about the problems and make constructive recommendations for change. We will continue to do that."
