Advocacy Priorities for CSW70

Key Recommendations for the CSW70

We formally present recommendations for the CSW70 First Draft, urgently advocating for the rights of all women and girls in their full diversity, including underrepresented, indigenous, disabled, and LGBTQI+ people. Our consultations reveal a need to comprehensively address the dynamics of women’s access to justice, where systemic failings fundamentally deny rights and erase survivors' suffering. The goal is to ensure justice mechanisms are accessible and effectively deliver equitable and lasting impact. The meaningful inclusion of all women and girls in leadership and decision-making is critical for successful implementation.

The CSW70 priority theme requires dismantling structural barriers to ensure access to justice for all women and girls across social, economic, political, cultural, and digital dimensions, and challenging ourselves to reconceptualize justice. In 2026, preparatory meetings to negotiate a Crimes against Humanity Treaty will begin, offering a binding global framework to define, prevent, and punish the most severe forms of gender-based harm. This expanded justice framework must prioritize accountability, center women's agency, connect prevention with enforcement, and ultimately drive the social and cultural transformations needed to end systemic discrimination and violence and foster a culture of peace.

We present urgent recommendations for the CSW70 First Draft advocating for the rights of all women and girls in their full diversity. These recommendations center meaningful inclusion, structural transformation, and a broad reconceptualization of justice — spanning legal, social, economic, cultural, and digital systems.

Expanding Transitional Justice: From Accountability to Structural Transformation

Transitional justice must move beyond post-conflict models to address systemic discrimination and structural inequality across societies.

  • Adopt an expanded transitional justice framework. Member States should integrate accountability for systemic rights violations into national justice mechanisms.
  • Mandate truth-telling & documentation. Require documentation of all forms of gender-related violence and atrocities.
  • Implement transformative reparations. Reparations must target systemic inequality and include full participation by all women and girls.
  • Guarantee non-recurrence. Reform institutions, laws, and policies that perpetuate discrimination, exclusion, and denial of development rights.

Social Justice: Recognizing Women & Girls as Agents of Change

Restructuring systems so women and girls can exercise agency requires gender-responsive governance and investment in inclusive institutions.

  • Center women’s leadership, lived experience, and decision-making across policy, peacebuilding, climate and economic arenas.
  • Implement intersectional mechanisms to ensure equitable access to power, resources, and safety — ending structural violence.
  • Invest in reproductive autonomy and movement solidarity to transform institutional conditions that perpetuate inequality.

Economic Justice: Systemic Reform & Social Protections

Economic justice is necessary to dismantle unpaid care burdens, wage discrimination, and asset denial that limit women's life chances.

  • Reform labor and property laws to remove discriminatory provisions; guarantee equal pay, safe workplaces, and autonomous asset ownership for women.
  • Expand publicly funded childcare, social protections, and legal aid services.
  • Implement and enforce ILO Convention No. 190 to eliminate violence and harassment in the world of work.

Political Justice: Equal & Safe Political Participation

Remove barriers to civic engagement and ensure mechanisms for remedy, accountability, and safe participation in governance.

  • Expand civic and legal literacy and voter-rights programs nationwide.
  • Establish and fund independent bodies to document, prevent, and prosecute violence against participants in public life.
  • Mandate gender-responsive electoral laws (quota mechanisms and enforcement) to ensure representative participation.

Cultural Justice: Engaging Men & Boys

Cultural change is required to shift norms — engaging men and boys as allies, challenging toxic masculinities, and countering digital misogyny.

  • Require social media platforms to control digital abuses and content that normalizes gender-based violence.
  • Promote alternative, positive role models for men and boys to contest normalized misogyny.
  • Engage leaders (women and men) to advocate for robust gender-justice laws with appropriate penalties and enforcement.

Digital Justice: Safety, Access, & Equity

Digital equity is a human-rights issue. Laws, infrastructure, and governance must protect women and girls online and ensure access.

  • Enforce gender-responsive digital rights and safety laws that address online violence and algorithmic bias.
  • Ensure affordable internet and digital literacy programs for girls, rural women, and marginalized groups.
  • Require gender impact assessments in AI, data governance, and digital policy with clear accountability mechanisms.
  • Cover online safety, equitable access, data rights, and algorithmic fairness across policy frameworks.

Expanding the Conceptualization of Justice

Justice includes social healing and restoration. Legal reforms must translate into lived realities backed by cultural transformation.

  • Convene spaces for stakeholders to explore justice’s social impact and foster collaborative work while minimizing competition.
  • Develop quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure cultural shifts toward justice and gender equality.
  • Communicate grassroots narratives that track refashioning of social norms toward just, equitable societies.

CSW Revitalization & Liquidity — Impact on Our Work

Reforms to UN financing and governance must preserve UN Women, reverse funding disparities, and ensure accountability across the Beijing Critical Areas.

  • Member States must pay assessed contributions on time and in full; arrears should forfeit budget influence with public reporting on program impacts.
  • Improve UN internal governance to ensure contributions are spent efficiently and responsibly.
  • Preserve and strengthen UN Women’s mandate with assessed (not voluntary) funding to protect long-term gender-equality programming.
Urgent ask: Ensure that the First Draft centers inclusive definitions, creates enforceable accountability pathways, and funds participatory reparative actions with women and girls in leadership at every stage.

Prepared by NGO CSW/NY Advocacy & Research Group — 23 December 2025

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