Are Women’s Rights Human Rights Once and for All?
FIGHT FOR RIGHTS VIEWPOINT 7 July 2025
Flavia Bustreo, Revati Phalkey, Rajat Khosla, and Kate Gilmore
It has been 30 years since the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing platformed a remarkable consensus among United Nations member states that “women’s rights are human rights.”[1] The slogan for which Beijing would become famous was penned long before the conference convened. Filipina activists in the 1980s headlined courageous campaigning against authoritarian populism with precisely that demand.[2] But in 2025, are women’s rights still human rights once and for all? Or are they never forever, being turned privileges for only a few?
Pushback on gender equality and women’s rights is being compounded by the spread of mis- and disinformation online. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the midst of persistent conflict and worsening climate change, it is all too clear that even long-recognized rights of women and girls cannot be taken for granted. As women’s rights activists have advocated, women’s rights are never truly fulfilled unless their rights in sexual and reproductive health are also respected and protected. Rights-based sexual and reproductive health is among the greatest sources of personal and community resilience. By corollary, restrictions on sexual and reproductive health and rights imperil health and dignity for women and girls in particular and thereby strip communities of their leaders, carers, contributors, and adaptors.
We have seen some significant gains in protecting women’s rights. Major pushback on sexual and reproductive health and rights and women’s rights is a sign that indeed we threatened to succeed. And all is not lost. As we move forward in these uncertain times, we can build on frameworks linking health with human rights that refer to the importance of creating enabling environments, partnering with others, and strengthening evidence and accountability.[3]
Create an enabling environment
Enshrining fundamental health rights within national constitutions can provide long-term safeguards against political shifts.[4] Legal instruments can be used to protect the right to health. And such steps are realistic. As of 2020, the constitutions of 74% of the world’s countries explicitly protect the right to health for all citizens, with 58% of all countries guaranteeing health rights.[5]
Although progress remains patchy and retreat not infrequent, there are examples of success.
France’s constitutional amendment in 2024 securing the right to abortion brings recognition of women’s reproductive autonomy into alignment with international human rights standards.[6] But it is the only country in the world to have done so. In sharp contrast, the United States Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and continued abortion bans in countries such as Poland and El Salvador underscore just how hostile legal environments for women’s health can be. At the global level, while more than 60 countries have liberalized abortion laws since the Beijing Conference, the United States’ reinstatement of the Mexico City Policy on January 24, 2025, alongside executive orders on the prohibition of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, demonstrate the destabilizing effect that legislation can have on essential health services and international partnerships.[7]
However, civil society organizations have played a critical role in challenging such draconian measures. In 2024, when parliamentarians in the Gambia attempted to repeal the law banning female genital mutilation, pressure by national-level civil society organizations, together with evidence-based advocacy by the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, helped halt the law’s reversal.[8]
While policy reform, legal provisions, and public advocacy are needed to uphold the right to health, strategic litigation can be a powerful tool for change. For example, in Brazil, a landmark case prompted widespread public discussion on strengthening maternal health protections when maternal mortality was recognized to be the result of preventable causes, highlighting systemic failures.[9]
Partner with others
Globally, civic space is shrinking, with political rights and civil liberties deteriorating in at least 60 countries in 2024.[10] Increasingly, civic discourse on human rights and health has migrated to digital platforms. However, while such platforms promise avenues for different voices to speak and for new demands to be made, in practice their underlying operating models allow certain types of voices to dominate, facilitating an unprecedented spread of mis- and disinformation, polarizing debate, and feeding misogyny, xenophobia, and racism.
Hateful rhetoric and virulent anti-rights speech by public leaders enable violence, especially against frontline workers for sexual and reproductive health and rights.[11] It is no coincidence that transgender people are more than four times more likely to be subjected to violence, that transgender women are more likely to be murdered than transgender men, and that transgender women of color are murdered much more frequently than white transgender women.[12]
In sum, the current situation is making claiming the right to health for many communities even more difficult than in previous decades, especially with regard to claiming sexual and reproductive rights. Within this context, building partnerships and coalitions across different sectors is crucial because combining resources and voices emboldens public advocacy and delivery. Within the health sector, we can learn from coalition-building work in the past that led to significant shifts in policy and programs. For instance, in 2000, grassroots health activists, civil society organizations, and academic institutions from low- and middle-income countries came together to form the People’s Health Movement to address the social, environmental, and economic determinants of health. Similarly, in South Africa, local activists galvanized a movement to demand access to HIV treatment for South Africans by raising public awareness and campaigning about issues surrounding the availability, affordability, and use of HIV treatment. This became known as the Treatment Action Campaign.[13] Learning from these movements, we must “foster a collective voice to demand recognition that health is a human right,” revive a “collective moral outrage,” and demand accountability for “massive violations of health and human rights.”[14]
Strengthen evidence and public accountability
Rights-sensitive data collection, along with robust public accountability mechanisms, can help accelerate universal health coverage, including for sexual and reproductive health. But the absence of accurate public information and the pervasiveness of mis- and disinformation erode public confidence, fuel distrust, and trigger active resistance to public health measures. Proactive measures are needed to counter the dissemination of false health information.
Information is also key to the accountability of health systems. For sexual and reproductive health and rights, legal accountability is necessary but insufficient.[15] Mandating public reporting on health and human rights progress can enhance transparency in health governance. For example, countries such as Finland and Mexico have established national institutions that effectively address right to health complaints, demonstrating how such frameworks can enhance citizen involvement in shaping health policies.
Social accountability, as demonstrated by programs in India, Nepal, Uganda, and Zambia, has the potential to promote the availability of sexual and reproductive health services for historically oppressed populations.[16] It is especially important that such programs include legal accountability, budgetary expenditure review, and measures to ensure inclusion and the creation of separate spaces that assure confidentiality and safety.
Conclusion
A new world order may well be upon us. It could bring unprecedented opportunity to reshape the very systems that have denied equity and justice for women and girls.[17] Thirty years after the Beijing Conference, the fight for women’s rights must continue if rights are to be once and for all. We have identified examples of how the fight has been successfully conducted and are inspired by the courage and ingenuity of the women’s rights community.
Flavia Bustreo is vice president of Fondation Botnar and co-chair of the Lancet Commission on Gender-Based Violence, Geneva, Switzerland.
Revati Phalkey is director of the United Nations University International Institute for Global Health, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Rajat Khosla is executive director of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health, Geneva, Switzerland.
Kate Gilmore is a former United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, London, United Kingdom.
Please address correspondence to Flavia Bustreo. Email: flaviabustreo@gmail.com.
Competing interests: None declared.
Copyright © 2025 Bustreo, Phalkey, Khosla, and Gilmore. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
References
[1] Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, UN Doc. A/CONF.177/20 (1995).
[2] L. Levenstein, “The Forgotten Origins of ‘Women’s Rights are Human Rights,’” Open Global Rights (September 29, 2020), https://www.openglobalrights.org/the-forgotten-origins-of-womens-rights-are-human-rights/.
[3] World Health Organization and Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Leading the Realization of Human Rights to Health and Through Health: Report of the High-Level Working Group on the Health and Human Rights of Women, Children, and Adolescents (World Health Organization, 2017).
[4] Human Rights Council, Contributions of the Right to Health Framework in Achieving the Health Related Sustainable Development Goals, UN Doc. A/HRC/38/37 (2018).
[5] World Policy Analysis Center, “Constitutional Approaches to the Right to Health” (2020), https://www.worldpolicycenter.org/constitutional-approaches-to-the-right-to-health.
[6] N. Sithole, C. Pretorius, R. Valev, et al., “The Future of Multilateralism Between Multipolarity and Populists in Power,” European Center for Populism Studies (April 28, 2024), https://doi.org/10.55271/rp0055.
[7] P. Skuster, E. A. Sully, and A. Friedrich-Karnik, Evidence for Ending the Global Gag Rule: A Multiyear Study in Two Countries (Guttmacher Institute, 2024).
[8] Inter-Parliamentary Union, “Statement from PMNCH and IPU Leadership on Repeal of Law Banning Female Genital Mutilation in the Gambia” (April 3, 2024), https://www.ipu.org/news/statements/2024-04/statement-pmnch-and-ipu-leadership-repeal-law-banning-female-genital-mutilation-in-gambia.
[9] A. E. Yamin, “Five Lessons for Advancing Maternal Health Rights in an Age of Neoliberal Globalization and Conservative Backlash,” Health and Human Rights 25/1 (2023).
[10] Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2025: The Uphill Battle to Safeguard Rights (Freedom House, 2025).
[11] V. Boydell, K. Gilmore, J. Kaur, et al., “Hostilities Faced by People on the Frontlines of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights: A Scoping Review,” BMJ Global Health 8/11 (2023).
[12] L. Westbrook, “The Matrix of Violence: Intersectionality and Necropolitics in the Murder of Transgender People in the United States, 1990–2019,” Gender and Society 37/3 (2023).
[13] Treatment Action Campaign, https://www.tac.org.za/.
[14] R. Khosla, “Health and Human Rights at a Crossroads,” Health and Human Rights 11/2 (2019).
[15] M. Schaaf and R. Khosla, “Necessary but Not Sufficient: A Scoping Review of Legal Accountability for Sexual and Reproductive Health in Low-Income and Middle-Income Countries,” BMJ Global Health 6/7 (2021).
[16] M. Schaaf, G. Arnott, K. M. Chilufya, et al., “Social Accountability as a Strategy to Promote Sexual and Reproductive Health Entitlements for Stigmatized Issues and Populations,” International Journal for Equity in Health 21/Suppl 1 (2024).
[17] N. Ntusi, “US Aid Cuts Are an Opportunity to Reimagine Global Health,” Nature Medicine 31 (2025).