New York, Paris, 12 March 2025. This year, the world’s biggest conference on women’s rights will be held at the United Nations, against the backdrop of an unprecedented threat to gender equality. At the head of this offensive ? The administration of US President Donald Trump.
On 24 January 2025, the United States of America renewed their adherence to the "Geneva Consensus Declaration". Drafted in 2020 during President Trump’s first term, it was signed by 35 states with ultra-conservative governments, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Hungary and Uganda. This declaration is an anti-abortion manifesto without any normative scope, despite the efforts of the promoters to give it the appearance of an official United Nations document. The United States withdrew its support for this political declaration in 2021 under the Biden administration. The text claims that "there is no international right to abortion, nor any obligation on States to fund or facilitate abortion” and that “the United Nations must respect national laws and policies in this area, without exerting external pressure".
"We’ve known since a long time that Donald Trump is an enemy of women. His administration and his court of dubious masculinists represent a huge source of hope for hate movements, which we call anti-rights and anti-gender movements", says Alice Bordaçarre, head of the women’s rights and gender equality office at FIDH. "The Geneva Consensus Declaration is the international continuation of its policy against women in the United States, with the same tactics. Lies, confusion, ideological obfuscation... We must respond with our weapons : the law, the universality of human rights, the strength of feminist movements and solidarity".
FIDH calls for this CSW to be the moment for a massive mobilization of feminist civil societies worldwide to counter the decline in women’s rights and achieve new commitments on an international scale. Markers of progress such as the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, adopted in 1995 by 189 States, are now openly called into question. In this context, women’s rights achievements must be surpassed, not merely defended.
As part of its presence at the 69th session of the CSW, FIDH is organizing two meetings to raise awareness on specific themes :
– on March 12 from 4pm to 5:30pm (UTC-4), at the Westin New York Grand Central Hotel, an event on the rollback of women’s rights in the Maghreb region, the aim of which is to highlight the alliances between authoritarian regimes and conservative groups in the region to carry out systemic attacks on women’s rights and maintain inequalities ;
– on March 13 from 8:30am to 10am (UTC-4), at the Salvation Army, an event supported by the Feminist Opportunities Now (FON) program, concerning the explosion of disappearances of women and girls in Mexico, with Idheas and Emaf, to highlight the institutional and judicial failings in this field and propose concrete recommendations to improve research and access to justice.