Other UN Issues
General News
Women’s rights and SOGI with Yogyakarta
This is a desperate call for global change to “our unjust and dysfunctional global financial system.”
Statement by Ms. Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls and issued on 22 May 2023, which warns against violence targeting women’s rights activists who express views that differ from gender ideology.
CoAL commends her expression of concern over the erosion of lesbian and other women’s space as a result of these attacks: ‘I am concerned by the shrinking space in several countries in the Global North for women and feminist organisations and their allies to gather and/or express themselves peacefully in demanding respect for their needs based on their sex and/or sexual orientation.’
UN Development Program
A new report from the UNDP (2023 GENDER SOCIAL NORMS INDEX (GSNI)) contains no earth-shattering news for women; we already know this. And it’s ironic that the message is coming from a UN agency where the word woman is becoming meaningless under the incursions from men invading our linguistic and physical spaces snd ‘rights’ spaces.
Attacks against lesbian and other women’s rights have intensified with the spread of gender ideology. A key tool used in this war against women has been the Yogyakarta principles, which have gained traction largely because of the political strategy to frame them as though they were UN sanctioned international best practice, even though they have been produced by various individuals with vested interests outside the UN structure involving government representation. Those individuals’ primary aim has been to strengthen acceptance of gender ideology in ways that have undermined women’s rights and blurred the distinction beween sexual orientation (SO) and gender identity (GI). This document has been criticised for good reasons by Bindel & Newman (2021).