Take back the sovereign power: Demanding accountability and reclaiming democratic spaces for women’s human rights and Development Justice
While women’s human rights have made strides in the last decades, democratic processes and spaces are deteriorating and shrinking at an alarming rate, leaving our collective voices silenced and our fundamental freedoms restricted.
2025 is an important year for social movements across the world. It marks 30 years of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (Beijing+30), 25 years of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda and 10 years of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDGs). We anticipate the 80th session of the UN General Assembly and the 30th session of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP30).
These processes and spaces result from decades of resistance and collective action of feminist and peoples’ movements, particularly from the Global South, to reclaim sovereign power and genuine liberation. However, these also serve as a reminder that existing systems continue to fail us that even decades after, women’s human rights and fundamental freedoms are still being negotiated, if not deleted.
On this International Women’s Day, the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development calls for an urgent and unwavering commitment to fight for accountability and to foster stronger cross-movement solidarity for women’s human rights and Development Justice.
We call on the UN and its bodies to fulfill their obligations to women’s human rights. The UN must seriously exercise its convening power to create and protect genuine accountability spaces, ensuring meaningful participation and leadership power of women and their diverse movements. This first step for the UN is to take bold, decisive action to hold governments accountable for violating human rights and fundamental freedoms.
Likewise, we call on governments to respect, protect and fulfill women’s human rights, not undermine them. We refuse any efforts to roll back any progress we fought and worked hard for, nor condone the repetition of injustice and subjugation in the disguise of women’s ’empowerment’.
Lastly, we call on the feminist movements and other social movements to mark 2025 as a year of accountability. Together, let us refuse to bear the burdens that threaten our lives, communities, and planet. Let us hold governments, institutions and corporations accountable for their role in perpetuating harm and exploiting us and our resources for profit. Let us expose the failure of frameworks and systems that fuel conflicts, wars, and militarism and undermine our human rights and fundamental freedoms.
Let us reclaim the spaces we collectively created and fought for, as reclaiming these spaces is both an act of resistance and a statement of hope at a time of rising threats and repression. Let us foster solidarity in every space we engage in, bringing more voices and amplifying our demands for women’s human rights and Development Justice together.###
