By: Dr. Beth Van Schaack, Jessica Anania and Vicka Heidt
Read in: Just Security
The United Nations’ annual convening of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) that concluded in New York this month unfolded at a moment of acute strain on the international legal order and an intensifying backlash against gender equality. Focused on the theme of “Ensuring and Strengthening Access to Justice for All Women and Girls,” this year’s CSW session underscored growing concerns that pathways to justice and accountability are narrowing, with direct implications for women’s rights but also for global security more broadly. Member states resoundingly resisted attempts by some states, led by the United States, to backtrack on commitments to gender equality and reproductive rights and to entrench harmful and exclusionary language in outcome documents. Instead, states recommitted in this year’s CSW Agreed Conclusions to building more inclusive and equitable legal systems and to eliminating discriminatory laws, policies, and practices.
Notwithstanding these broad-based expressions of support for expanding access to justice, real-world opportunities for justice continue to contract worldwide, and by extension and often even more dangerously, for women and girls. Across the globe, governments are undermining judicial independence, restricting civil society activity, and codifying discriminatory legal frameworks that limit women’s ability to seek redress. Internationally, parallel pressures are weakening enforcement mechanisms. Those pressures include declining financial and political support for multilateral institutions (even as public support remains perhaps surprisingly strong); the use of sanctions and vetoes against justice actors and institutions; and growing fragmentation among and within states. These dynamics are mutually reinforcing: the domestic erosion of the rule of law weakens international cooperation, while a hollowed out multilateral system reduces external checks on state behavior.
Women and girls are among the first to experience these fractures. Furthermore, restrictions on their legal rights, barriers to reporting crimes, and rising gender-based violence serve as early indicators of broader institutional decline and descent into autocracy. Recent efforts to curtail or politicize human rights reporting, including on gender and LGBTQ+ protections, further erode the evidentiary basis required for accountability and signal a retreat from transparency within the international system. Without credible monitoring and documentation, abuses are harder to prove, prosecute, prevent, and repair.
CSW’s theme of access to justice has particular relevance at this pivotal moment for international law and the broader multilateral system. Key calls to action in the Agreed Conclusions can advance women and girls’ access to justice in tangible and durable ways – if committed states follow through with action.
Justice is a precondition for long-term stability and peace, a point made across CSW events. Denying women and girls the full realization of their legal rights entrenches discrimination and facilitates violence against them. Likewise, the failure to hold perpetrators accountable, including for gender-based and sexual crimes, signals tolerance for breaches of international law that can exacerbate societal instability. From Sudan to Afghanistan to Ukraine, impunity emboldens autocrats and triggers the resurgence of conflict. Speakers throughout CSW emphasized that worsening backlash against, and disregard for, women and girls’ rights — including their right to justice — serve as an urgent warning for the multilateral system.
CSW discussions explored the ways in which autocratic governments are codifying repression into national law and using domestic legal tools to weaponize their justice systems against human rights. For women and girls, this often takes the form of laws — including those pertaining to property, economic, marital, and custodial rights — that privilege men over women, penalize or stigmatize women experiencing sexual assault, legalize early and childhood marriage, and prevent women and girls from safely reporting harassment and intimate partner violence.
CSW conversations confirmed that genuine access to justice must be holistic, which depends on factors beyond elements of the legal architecture. While there is an instinct to focus solely on national and international legal systems, adjacent dimensions such as public health, education, employment, and even climate change must be considered. For instance, domestic care burdens can prevent women from participating in legal processes, while displacement caused by climate shocks impedes access to reporting and in-person services. Women and girls encounter layered and context-specific barriers that shape both their ability to access justice and what justice looks like in practice. Age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, and displacement can all influence exposure to harm, access to legal systems, and trust in formal institutions. Efforts to expand access to justice must therefore account for this diversity and the inevitable intersections in women’s experience of discrimination and harm.
Finally, absent formal avenues for redress, women and girls are increasingly relying on alternative mechanisms — including non-criminal forums — to achieve accountability. This reflects both the shortcomings — and even failures — of current legal infrastructure while presenting an opportunity to reimagine and participate in the creation of justice processes. For instance, inspired by the Tokyo Women’s Tribunal’s focus on the abuses against women in World War II (including so-called “comfort women”), the recent People’s Tribunal on Women of Afghanistan provided a forum to recognize and document the Taliban’s systematic and multifaceted violations of women and girls’ rights. These efforts provide a truth-telling platform to gather testimony and establish an official record to support eventual prosecutions and other formal pathways for accountability. The People’s Tribunal, for example, may inform prosecutions before the International Criminal Court, which recently released unprecedented arrest warrants for senior Taliban figures who stand accused of gender persecution. For the first time before an international tribunal, the charges include harm to LGBTQI+ individuals and their allies who refuse to conform to the Taliban’s regressive gender ideology.
Women also may envision more expansive conceptualizations of justice, advocating for reforms like poverty reduction, climate adaptation, or access to education to redress structural inequalities. While the architects of transitional justice processes have long recognized that justice extends beyond the courtroom, the implementation of this idea remains limited and underrealized. Committing to put such understandings into practice may open the way for new and novel partnerships — including between lawyers, aid workers, and development actors — to deliver contextualized and localized accountability while fortifying rights-based coalitions.
As domestic legal regimes are manipulated to legitimize discrimination and enable violence, it is crucial to promote, strengthen, and enforce international law as another pathway for recognition and redress of violations. While the theme “access to justice” was interpreted variously, the importance of international law emerged as a key throughline at this year’s CSW in at least five ways.
First, CSW’s Agreed Conclusions affirmed that investments in national, regional, hybrid, and international justice institutions must be protected and strengthened as a matter of national and global security. These courts are proving to be important fora for women to advance human rights claims against responsible actors. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, for example, recently recognized reproductive violence as a crime against humanity in a case involving Peru’s forced sterilization policy. Likewise, the International Court of Justice will soon hear its first case under the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), with Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, and Canada alleging that Afghanistan’s de facto rulers have breached multiple CEDAW provisions. Given mounting domestic barriers, these supranational institutions offer a powerful vehicle to protect and advance human rights, including for women and girls.
Second, international law and related norms can enhance domestic legal frameworks by encouraging states to expand avenues of redress for discrimination and violence targeting women and girls by incorporating international crimes into domestic legal codes. CSW participants flagged several next steps; notably, this should include the recognition and condemnation of gender apartheid as a crime against humanity, as is contemplated in the emergent Crimes Against Humanity treaty. States should also affirm their commitments to relevant U.N. frameworks, including the Women, Peace and Security agenda and related binding resolutions.
Providing comprehensive redress for gender-based violence requires recognizing and addressing evolving patterns of harm. Technology-facilitated gender-based violence — including online harassment, non-consensual image distribution, and AI-generated sexual content and deep fakes — is expanding rapidly, while accountability frameworks lag. As highlighted at CSW, digital spaces are not fully distinct from physical ones; rather, they are extensions of public and private life where rights must be protected and enforced. While some states are beginning to respond to harms caused by new technologies, absent greater international coordination, these efforts will remain fragmented and inadequate.
Third, CSW participants called for states to uphold commitments under international law and offer a forum for their own nationals to seek justice for gender-based discrimination and violence, even in wartime. Historically, transitional justice models have predicated accountability on the cessation of hostilities. However, accountability efforts in Ukraine — spearheaded, in many instances, by women and women-led organizations — demonstrate the potential for the delivery of justice with greater expediency. By initiating trials and implementing an innovative reparations mechanism, Ukraine demonstrates that survivors’ access to justice is not only a priority, but a precondition for a secure future and a just resolution of the conflict. Ensuring access to justice now helps ameliorate the concern that the longer the quest for some measure of accountability is prolonged, the more likely it is to be traded away or abandoned.
Fourth, CSW participants confirmed the need to utilize international law to expand access to alternative and innovative justice pathways for victims and survivors. In an increasingly fragmented multilateral system, states can signal their strength and commitment to international law by investigating and prosecuting atrocity crimes regardless of where they are committed. That principle of universal jurisdiction allows states to prosecute grave violations of international law regardless of where the crime occurred or the nationality of the victim or perpetrator.
Universal jurisdiction enables victims and survivors — including women and girls who have endured gender-based crimes — to sidestep indifferent or discriminatory national legal systems to seek accountability in more hospitable legal settings. For instance, universal jurisdiction trials in Europe have thus far been the only meaningful way for Yazidis to seek accountability for genocidal sexual violence and enslavement perpetrated by the Islamic State. Likewise, Tigrayan survivors of wartime sexual violence have filed a criminal complaint in Germany against Ethiopian and Eritrean government and military officials. And Argentina is weighing a case pertaining to alleged abuses by Iranian officials during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in 2022. Universal jurisdiction can thus counter the corruption of domestic judicial systems elsewhere that contravene basic rights and freedoms, including access to justice.
A fifth point that emerged at CSW regarding the role of international law is that “access to justice” is multifaceted, and enabling conditions must be enhanced accordingly. Legal remedies alone are insufficient where structural barriers prevent victims and survivors from engaging with justice processes in the first place. Factors such as displacement, digital exclusion, and economic insecurity can all impede reporting, participation, and follow-through in legal proceedings.
Moreover, justice processes themselves can reproduce harm if not designed with survivors in mind. Risks of re-traumatization, stigma, and retaliation continue to deter engagement, particularly for women and girls navigating gender-based violence. Expanding access to justice therefore requires a more integrated approach that combines legal accountability with survivor-centered support, invests in enabling infrastructure, and ensures that justice processes are accessible, safe, and responsive to lived realities.
The message emerging from CSW is clear: the multilateral system — including international justice mechanisms — faces grave threats. However, as underscored throughout CSW, women are at the forefront of recognizing and combatting global backsliding, and the preservation of their rights remains central to protecting rule of law and global stability.
Retreating from international law — including commitments on women’s rights — not only blocks pathways to justice for victims and survivors, but also cedes leadership on the global stage to actors seeking to undermine the multilateral system, root and branch. States must immediately look for ways to implement the access-to-justice promises contained within the CSW Agreed Conclusions and continue to resist inevitable efforts, by the United States and others, to further erode women’s rights globally.
© 2025 Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice.
