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| Photo: Diverse Voices and Action (DIVA) for Equality Fiji |
The Women’s Rights Caucus (WRC)—a global intersectional
feminist coalition of more than 400 organizations, networks, and individuals
that advocates for gender equality at the United Nations—welcomes the adoption
of the CSW agreed conclusions around the theme, “Accelerating the achievement
of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing
poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender
perspective”.
The outcome of the conference marks the renewal of a global
commitment to achieving inclusive gender equality and continued multilateral
support to advance the human rights of women and girls in all their diversity.
In a press conference held before the adoption of the agreed
conclusions on Friday, members of the WRC laid out their CSW68 priorities,
which include economic justice, specifically concerning tax, debt and trade,
climate justice, and gender justice, including sexual and
reproductive health and rights (SRHR).
“We visualized a dismantling of hierarchies and inequities
as the starting point of CSW68 to create a global, social and economic
contract, from a decolonial and feminist lens, that centers human rights and
care, the right to self-determination and sovereignty, reparatory justice, and
built from the heart of the struggles and oppressions of the most marginalized,
vulnerable, and the colonized, in the Global South,” said Maitree Muzumdar of
Feminist Manch (India) and the Young Feminist Caucus, a co-convenor of the WRC.
“Effective mobilization and collective action require addressing the root
causes of poverty and radically shifting how economic and financial structures
are imagined, by challenging the exponential growth of developed countries and
the concentration of wealth in the hands of few.”
Economic Justice
“Women are doubly burdened with unpaid caregiving
responsibilities amidst dwindling wages and the soaring cost of living. Social
protection has been greatly affected due to state budget cuts. Decreasing
public financing and support to social services and instead shifting funds to
service debt is deplorable and unacceptable as social protection is not an act
of charity, the state has a responsibility to ensure the well-being of its
citizens,” said Tharanga de Silva of the Women and Media Collective in Sri Lanka.
Meanwhile, Tharanga adds, “Wealthy elites and corporations
are often protected and prioritized in the state-proposed taxation rates and/or
tax holidays. These mechanisms allow illicit financial flows and tax havens for
the rich, while the poor sink further into debt and face issues such as
malnutrition. It’s crucial to implement innovative sources of public finance
such as a global financial transaction tax, redirection of military budgets,
and additional taxes on arms trade.”
In line with our analysis, the WRC is encouraged to see
progress made in the following areas as reflected in the language of the agreed
conclusions adopted last Friday:
- Tax. Improving international tax cooperation and curbing illicit financial flows to expand fiscal space and direct resources to women and girls, assessing the impacts of tax policies on women and girls, increasing the progressivity of tax policies with a focus on taxing those with the highest ability to pay, including via wealth and corporate taxation, and preventing regressive taxation that disproportionately impacts women with low or no incomes, and eliminating “pink tax”.
- Debt. Improving international debt mechanisms to support debt review, debt payment suspensions, and debt restructuring and recognizing the important role, on a case-by-case basis, of debt relief, including debt cancellation, and debt restructuring as debt crisis prevention, management, and resolution tools, and as measures that can enhance fiscal space for investments for all woman and girls living.
- Care. Recognizing, reducing, and redistributing women’s and girls’ disproportionate share of unpaid care and domestic work, including through sustained investments in the care economy and by promoting work-life balance, and by taking steps to measure the value of this work to determine its contribution to the national economy, and stressing the role of member states as the main bearer of responsibility in “strengthen[ing] care and support systems, including the care economy, in which all receive the basic social services, care, and support” as well as collective responsibility, involving States, communities and families as well as the private sector.
- Sanctions. Refraining from promulgating and applying any unilateral economic, financial, or trade measures not in accordance with international law.
- Data. Recognizing the need for “individual-level data”, terminology that is introduced for the first time in CSW agreed conclusions, in addressing multidimensional poverty.
We believe these updates define important standards for
global and domestic economic governance norms and poverty-eradication efforts
as they relate to gender equality. We note, however, that the text is silent on
issues of international trade.
Climate Justice
We regret that linkages to climate change, which
disproportionately affects women and girls and pushes them closer or further
into poverty, were not clearly developed in the text.
“Any talk about poverty eradication is not possible without
us working on the defense of ourselves, other species, and the living planet.
We are in a time when we have crossed 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries and are
losing 200 species a day, which is a thousand times the background rate of
species extinction. This is beyond urgent,” Noelene Nabulivou of Diverse Voices
and Action (DIVA) for Equality Fiji, said during the press conference.
There is also a missed opportunity to clearly articulate the
need for new, additional, and debt-free climate finance, particularly for
Global South countries.
Echoing this demand, Nohora Alejandra Quiguantar member of
the Young Feminist Caucus and the indigenous youth-led organization Tejiendo
Pensamiento remarked that, “economic policies are not aligned with the
protection of territories, and government budgets for climate mitigation and
adaptation programs are insufficient”.
SRHR and LGBTQI equality
During negotiations, we observed significant pushback
against gender-expansive language, with several Member States challenging
long-established agreed language on gender in the text, including “gender-based
violence”, and demonstrating little flexibility on issues related to sexual and
reproductive health and rights (SRHR). Despite the pushback, references to
“gender-based violence” and “sexual and reproductive health” were eventually
retained in the text.
Additionally, CSW68 negotiations took place under
unprecedented limitations, as the United Nations recently announced a liquidity
crisis and is implementing several austerity measures, which have limited the
amount of time that governments can spend negotiating. The constrained time for
negotiations meant that more and more compromises had to be made. In the final
days of the negotiations, we saw the text get weakened as Member States sought
to produce an outcome on the last day of CSW.
Despite the challenging environment for SRHR during
negotiations, we welcome the recommendations that made it into the text, such
as increasing investments in health technologies, particularly digital health,
reducing out-of-pocket spending, and recognizing women’s rights to have control
over and decide freely and responsibly on all matters related to their
sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health. We deeply regret, however,
that fundamental issues related to the protection of the human rights of LGBTQI
people were not considered in the text.
We are increasingly concerned by the presence of anti-rights
actors, organizing parallel events and mobilizations at the CSW and lobbying
missions to roll back on SRHR and rights of LGBTQI people. “These actors co-opt
and distort women’s, girls’, and gender-diverse people’s rights by undermining
rights to bodily autonomy, including rights to safe abortion and reproductive
health technologies, and deploying anti-LGBTQI and vile anti-trans rhetoric,”
said Fadekemi Akinfaderin, Chief Advocacy Officer at Fòs Feminista,
co-convening organization of the Women’s Rights Caucus.
As a feminist movement, we stand with all women in all their
diversity, including trans, intersex, and non-binary, and we remain deeply
committed to fighting this worldview that is based on inequality and denying
rights with the LBTI Caucus, a co-convenor of the WRC.
“We understand gender as a spectrum of diverse identities
that are not just related to gender expression and our sexual orientation, but
also to all the intersectional status positions and realities in which women
and girls live in different contexts and countries worldwide,” said Orneill
Latiyah of Outright International and the LBTI Caucus.
We also welcome the adoption of a new HIV/AIDS resolution by
the Commission during the session. This is a successful technical update of the
Women, the Girl Child and HIV resolution (CSW 60/2) that aligns it with
critical global frameworks such as the 2030 Agenda, particularly Sustainable
Development Goal 5 on gender equality and the empowerment of all women and
girls, the 2021 Political Declaration on HIV/AIDS, and the 2025 HIV/AIDS
10-10-10 targets which are key enablers for getting on track to end AIDS as a
public health threat by 2030. We welcome this renewed political commitment as
an opportunity to close the gap between normative global policy frameworks and
national policies and interventions.
On Palestine
Finally, we recognize that CSW68 happens amid an ongoing
genocide in Gaza, where over 40,000 have been killed, more than half a million
are on the brink of famine and 80% of the population has been displaced since
October last year. While we welcome broad references made to women’s and girls’
conflict and post-conflict situations and the role of women and girls in
peacebuilding, we regret that the agreed conclusions text could not reflect
language to condemn foreign occupation and support a specific reference to a
permanent ceasefire in Gaza, which had been brought up during negotiations.
“We want all wars, all colonization, and all militarization
to stop immediately. Not one more life taken, not one more tree burnt, not one
more river dried, and not one more square meter of land anywhere occupied,”
said Soudeh Rad, an Iranian-French nonbinary activist from eco-queer feminist
organization, Spectrum.
However, we are encouraged to see a strong recommendation in
the text that “urges all States and the specialized agencies and organizations
of the United Nations system to continue to support and provide emergency
assistance through mechanisms that provide vital services to women and girls
living in situations of armed conflict, including those subject to acts that
may amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide”, especially
given recent announcements of Member States to suspend and withdraw their
funding to UNRWA.
As feminists, we will continue to bear witness to the genocide in Palestine, the atrocities in Sudan and Congo, and many territories around the world, and carry the demand for a permanent ceasefire in all possible spaces for advocacy and activism.
See the original WRC publication
here.
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