War of words rages at UN over women, gender rights

Reproductive rights activists take part in a protest on National Women's Strike 2024 day outside the City Hall in Los Angeles, June 24, 2024.(AFP)

• UN rights chief Volker Turk has long warned of “systematic” efforts to strip women of their hard-won rights.
• A range of African countries also figure among those taking part in efforts to remove language on gender rights from UN texts

Geneva: After warning of increasing attacks on women and gender rights around the world, the UN finds itself a key arena for a war of words over how those rights are defined.
UN rights chief Volker Turk has long warned of “systematic” efforts to strip women of their hard-won rights.
Speaking before the UN Human Rights Council last week, he highlighted extreme cases like Afghanistan and Iran, but warned the pushback was happening worldwide.
“No country is immune from regression in women’s rights,” he said, also decrying “ongoing discrimination and exclusion on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.”
The UN itself has meanwhile become a key battleground in the fight.
Diplomats describe growing efforts to remove references to women’s rights or to sexual orientation and gender identity that had long gone uncontested in resolutions and texts across the UN system.
“What we’re seeing is a concerted effort to push back on issues related to gender and sexual orientation and gender identity in ... the work of international organizations in Geneva broadly,” said a woman diplomat based in Geneva, who asked not to be named.
Gurchaten Sandhu, program director at the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), described “coordinated efforts” of various actors “to push back on equality.”
“There is a heightened sense of paranoia” around any gender-related terms used in UN texts, he told AFP.
The United Nations working group on discrimination against women and girls presented a report to the rights council this week highlighting an “escalating gender backlash” and a clear “resurgence of a conservative and retrogressive narrative in international fora.”
Reacting to the report, Russian representative Ilia Barmin told the council Thursday that his country regretted that the text contained “controversial concepts,” including on the right to reproductive and sexual health.
“There is no such right in international law,” he insisted, adding that Russia also opposed the inclusion of “new categories of human rights” in the report, like “the right to bodily autonomy.”
The rights council is not the only UN forum where words are being hotly debated.
The World Health Organization’s decision-making assembly last month was for instance forced for the first time to take a resolution to a vote instead of adopting it by consensus due to opposition over gender-related terminology.
A conservative alliance of countries, including Egypt, Russia and Saudi Arabia, balked at the term “gender-responsive” in the text, although they ultimately failed in their bid to change it.
And last year, the UN labor agency’s budget barely passed amid a dramatic standoff over references — which had gone uncontested in previous budgets — to discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
The tensions have especially pitted mainly Western countries against conservative, largely Muslim states.
But Sandhu warned it would be “a mistake to think it’s coming from one direction.”
A range of African countries also figure among those taking part in efforts to remove language on gender rights from UN texts.
So too do Russia and China, although observers suggested their motivations are less about conviction than a desire to build alliances and to upset Western opponents.
Others highlight the Vatican’s role.
“The earliest reference to ‘gender ideology’ as a dangerous, subversive phenomenon that needed to be stopped came from the Vatican,” said Erin Kilbride, a researcher with Human Rights Watch.
Pope Francis earlier this year doubled down on the issue, publishing a document listing gender theory among the world’s “grave violations of human dignity.”
Lobbying by “anti-rights groups” is also on the rise at the UN, the woman diplomat said.
The groups, typically funded by Gulf states, Russia and influential US religious movements, had become “increasingly vocal and coordinated,” she warned.
They were pushing talking points on traditional gender roles, anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ rights on countries, which then use them in UN debates, she added.
A Western diplomat, who asked not to be named, decried “a very strong offensive.”
There is a group of countries, he warned, “intent on felling a whole host of social rights gained over the past 30 years.”