Οn 12 March 2025 the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk addressed the Annual Meeting of the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions
…Our partnership is especially crucial today, when the international system and the global consensus on human rights are under tremendous pressure. Across all regions, we see attempts to ignore, undermine and redefine human rights, to pit one right against another.
Women’s rights are one such example.
The history of women’s rights has always been one of ebbs and flows. There have been incredibly important advances – universal suffrage, the right to work, property, inheritance, and economic rights – followed by setbacks.
It has never been a straight path, but there has been progress overall. And the setbacks are temporary, because you cannot turn back the clock on gender equality and on the rights of women and girls. Even if there are those who loudly will try do so, you cannot.
What is clear is that we cannot take anything for granted and must never be complacent.
Today, among other examples, the challenges include online and offline violence against women and girls, arbitrary limits to sexual and reproductive health and rights, resurgent toxic ideas about masculinity, especially among young men.
Then there are the extreme cases of oppression and persecution of women such as in Afghanistan and parts of Yemen.
Amidst all of this, against tremendous odds, and at great personal cost, women human rights defenders have remained steadfast in pushing for gender equality for women everywhere.
More broadly, despite progress over decades, women still go unrecognized and ignored in many areas of life.
In a world largely built by men, for men, the gender data gap persists. We need to address the invisibility of women on the data front. For example, women are still largely overlooked when it comes to science, healthcare, and the development of new technologies. According to Harvard University, 70 percent of the people impacted by chronic pain are women. And yet, 80 percent of pain studies are conducted on male mice, or on men.
For women with disabilities, women of African descent, indigenous women and other minorities, the disparities are even greater. For example, there is a 2:1 gender gap in internet access in favour of men with disabilities compared to women with disabilities.
Nearly 60 percent of women’s employment globally is in the informal economy, but the value of that work is often excluded from economic indicators. Women’s productivity and contributions are not captured or valued. And the COVID-19 pandemic made it clear that economies depend on women’s unpaid care work.
There is a high risk that women will continue to be invisible as an overwhelmingly male generation of engineers develop AI systems and other new technologies.
Women and girls face entrenched discrimination, perpetuated by harmful power dynamics that subjugate and oppress half the world’s population.
Unless we dismantle structural inequalities piece by piece; and until we have full gender parity and equality, women’s rights will be vulnerable to fierce pushback and even manipulation.
The primary duty to promote and protect the rights of women and girls rests with States, in line with international human rights law.
But everyone in society – companies, including social media companies, civil society organisations, and national human rights institutions – has a role to play, and a stake in this issue.
So much of the progress on women’s rights has been due to mobilisation at the national level. You are the best examples of that.
For example, painstaking advocacy by women human rights defenders led to the adoption of laws and policies on violence against women in a number of countries.
The private sector is working in collaboration with Governments to help to close the gender pay gap in a number of other countries.
These examples of success can inspire communities in other regions, inform international standards and improve the situation for women everywhere.
As national human rights institutions, your role in promoting and protecting human rights is key. You are uniquely placed as advocates of international law and experts on the national context.
Human rights are about facts. That is why our work to monitor and report on gender equality at the national level is crucial for legal and policy reform. You can also come up with creative new ideas on how to make women visible in data.
Human rights are about the law. The right of women, in all their diversity, to have an equal say in all decisions that shape their societies, economies, and futures, is non-negotiable. Your advocacy for full gender parity across all policy areas, from economics to climate, from the design and roll-out of digital technologies to peace negotiations, can help make that law a lived reality on the ground. There are myriad examples within your own work of how to do that.
Within your institutions, you can lead by example by setting a high standard of gender parity and ensuring gender equality in staffing at all levels.
And human rights are about compassion – the glue that unites us in our common humanity. With our societies so divided, we need urgently open spaces for dialogue and joint action by different constituencies who may not always agree: Governments, companies, civil society, religious and faith leaders. You are uniquely placed to build that space and bring various communities together in a public space for open debate and dialogue.
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The UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner participated via videolink.
https://www.undp.org/speeches/statement-high-level-opening-ganhri-annual-conference-2025
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 