Between 9-20 March 2026, the United Nations is hosting the 70th session of the annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York. As the largest gender equality gathering in the world, CSW is often an important space for feminist movements to come together, strategise, and advocate for policy advancement and implementation of women’s rights obligations. But this year’s CSW is taking place amidst rapidly escalating fascism in the United States, the host country of the United Nations, making the environment around the conference more repressive and restrictive for the feminist movements that are essential to its success and legitimacy.
CSW cannot truly claim anymore to be a global gathering on women’s rights when it takes place in a country that systematically prevents women from dozens of countries from participating in person. The US has formally imposed full or partial travel bans on around 40 countries, including Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Haiti, Libya, Niger, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen. These bans will especially prevent feminists from countries most impacted by war, conflict, and imperialism from attending CSW and other multilateral conferences that take place in New York. They compound the huge preexisting challenges obtaining visas to the United States, something which WILPF adopted a resolution on at our 2022 International Congress.
The fascist, white Christian nationalist, and militaristic ideology of the Trump administration have come to the forefront in its work at the United Nations. It withdrew from 66 different international organisations, arguing that “what started as a pragmatic framework of international organisations for peace and cooperation has morphed into a sprawling architecture of global governance, often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests.” Even where it has not withdrawn , including at CSW, the US delegation is consistently and actively trying to dismantle the UN’s work on gender equality, women’s rights, and sustainable development by rolling back language on gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive health and rights, inclusion, social justice, and beyond. On the first day of CSW70, the US tried to sabotage the adoption of the Agreed Conclusions by proposing anti-rights amendments, and galvanising some support from other likeminded countries, which resulted in the Agreed Conclusions being brought to a vote. Ultimately, the Agreed Conclusions were adopted with the US being the only vote against.
Over the past year, the US government has also exponentially increased funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), expanding detention and enforcement operations. Beyond the violence ICE is using to terrorise immigrant communities, this repression of movement also is making it riskier and more dangerous to travel to the US. This may especially be the case for those who are outspoken on issues such as Israel’s genocide in Gaza, given that the Trump administration has adopted new “anti-terrorism” executive orders and memoranda that target anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, and feminist activists, among others.
Within this climate, what does it mean for us, as feminists, to continue to engage in these spaces? What does it mean for the United States to continue to be the host country of the United Nations when it is not only restricting access to it, but also potentially contributing to its imminent financial collapse? And politically, what does the priority theme of CSW70, access to justice, mean when impunity for genocide and flagrant human rights violations is the norm?
Although the domestic political repression in the US is reaching a new stage, it is important to also acknowledge that for years, feminists have criticised spaces such as CSW for not sufficiently holding states accountable to their obligations on women’s rights. It has been challenging for some years now to advance progressive language on gender, amidst pushback not just from the US, but from other powerful states such as Russia and China, as well as Member States and observers such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Vatican, and more. States that are allies on some issues — such as progressive gender language – are often not allies on global justice issues relating to debt or militarism, for example, and vice versa. Crucially for WILPF, the connection to armed conflict and militarism is almost never made at CSW, where these critical issues are siloed away to the purview of the Security Council. This is even though 31 years ago, the Beijing Platform for Action identified disarmament, military spending, and women’s participation in peace as key feminist issues. All of this means that, in many ways, we have already been lowering the bar of what it means to hold a “women’s rights conference” and have normalised lack of accountability, inaction, and cheap talk over concrete steps towards change.
As an organisation that advocated for the creation of the League of Nations over a hundred years ago, and which has been accredited by ECOSOC since the founding days of the UN, WILPF has consistently envisioned and worked for a multilateral system that delivers peace and freedom for all people. But as other feminist organisations such as AWID have argued, CSW cannot be “business as usual”. Back in 2017, WILPF boycotted CSW due to the initial travel bans of the first Trump administration, which targeted several Muslim-majority countries. This year, we are operating in an environment of severe repression, but also one of extreme defunding, where feminist organisations throughout the world are shutting down due to cuts in Official Development Assistance (ODA) and other funding. This is aiming to silence our voices, stop our work, and exclude us further from tables we must be part of.
Feminists across the SWANA region, including the Arab Feminist Network, are mobilising to demand that the international community recognises that they are being excluded from these spaces through a campaign #CSW70WithoutUs. The Egyptian organisation Centre for Egyptian Women Legal Assistance (CEWLA) took the decision to not participate in CSW70, “in protest against the continued convening of the conference in a city that has become politically unsafe for human rights defenders—particularly women human rights defenders—amid systematic policies of restriction, exclusion, and surveillance that cast a shadow over the orientations and outcomes of the UN committee.”
Palestinian feminist organisations have also jointly consulted and issued a statement regarding CSW70, stating that “restricting women’s access from these contexts to the Commission on the Status of Women entrenches the marginalisation of the most affected voices and undermines the Commission’s core purpose and directly contradicts the theme of this session: Access to Justice.” In this statement, they collectively decided to limit participation to virtual events only. They have also issued other calls, including:
- Demanding the relocation of the Commission on the Status of Women to an alternative, more just and inclusive host country, preferably in the Global South, in order to ensure equitable access and lower participation costs, particularly for women from conflict and occupation contexts.
- Urging feminist actors participating in CSW70 in New York to protest and to include the exclusion of Palestinian women from participation in their advocacy messages, while amplifying the voices of Palestinian women living under occupation and genocide.
- Demanding that UN Women takes a clear and public stance against exclusionary and discriminatory policies that prevent women from meaningful participation in the work of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), and to demand guarantees for women’s unrestricted access to UN decision-making platforms, in line with the core principles of equality, justice, and inclusivity upon which the agency is founded.
As WILPF has an office in New York, we are attending CSW70 with a scaled-back presence, with much participation being from WILPF members already based in the United States. We will not be treating this as a typical CSW, but will instead be sounding the alarm about the dismantling of multilateralism, pattern of exclusion, defunding of the UN, and the fact that impunity has become the norm. It is crucial that Member States do not accept this as the new reality, but instead use the multi-year implementation of the CSW revitalisation process to think about how to make this conference radical, bold, effective, accessible, and just.
