Seventy-five years after its founding, and faced with a new round of unprecedented challenges, the United Nations remains a global force for advancing human rights, defending the world’s most marginalized, and forging collective action to address our most difficult problems.
The challenges of 2020, including COVID-19, rising nationalism and authoritarianism, and increased conservative pushback to human rights has made the UN’s efforts to advance gender justice more important than ever.
Prioritizing Gender Equality in COVID Response
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Member States have mobilized to learn lessons from each other about how to effectively address the new and unprecedented pandemic while ensuring the crisis and recovery efforts are inclusive and responsive to the needs of those often left behind. Most recently, IWHC worked with other feminist and human rights organizations to advocate with Member States on an omnibus resolution that addresses the impacts of COVID-19 and charts a way forward for countries, communities, and people.
COVID-19 has exacerbated existing gender inequalities, increased gender-based violence and child, early, and forced marriage, and reduced access to education. The resolution recognizes these impacts and addresses the multiple and intersecting forms of violence, discrimination, stigmatization, exclusion, and inequalities that are disproportionately experienced by women and girls. Specifically, the resolution calls on governments to:
- Ensure sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights, and universal access to health and social services, without discrimination.
- Implement measures to recognize, reduce, and redistribute women’s and girls’ disproportionate share of unpaid care and domestic work, including through poverty eradication measures, labor policies, public services, and gender-responsive social protection programs.
- Maintain and designate protection shelters, hotlines and help desks, health and support services, and legal protection and support as essential services for all women and girls to counter sexual and gender-based violence.
- Ensure full, equal, and meaningful participation in decision-making and equal access to leadership and representation in all spheres of society for women in COVID-19 response.
The advocacy of IWHC and allied organizations on the omnibus resolution guaranteed that it incorporated some of the actions prioritized by feminist movements and articulated in the principles of the transformative Feminist Response to COVID-19.
