On March 16, 2021, at a virtual Townhall Meeting for civil society as part of CSW65, UN Secretary-General Guterres said that women must be “front and centre” of the pandemic recovery as a matter of economics, efficiency, effectiveness and social resilience. “Male-dominated teams will come up with male-dominated solutions... We cannot go back to the failed man-made policies that have...

By UN Rep Ayuska Motha, AIWC Cologne

2020 has seen the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations put on hold. The Conference of the Parties (COP) Climate Summit was postponed from December 2020 to November 2021 while many countries struggled to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and all its short- and long-term repercussions. This decision was made very...

By Laurie Richardson, UN Liaison

Last June, the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, and Philando Castile, together with over 650 civil society organizations, called on the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) to convene a special session to respond to the situation of escalating human rights abuses in the United States. They sought the creation of an...

By Cecilia Zhuang, UN Rep, AWC Philippines

On October 23, a webinar was hosted by the NGO Women's Rights & Gender Equality Caucus, Australia and Asia-Pacific Women's Watch (APWW). Four female leaders shared their observations of how COVID-19 has impacted women's livelihoods in the Asia Pacific region.

Yukiko Oda from Japan Women's Watch covered the East Asia region. Despite the...

United Nations member countries recently voted by secret ballot to elect 15 countries to the UN Human Rights Council (HRC). Human rights observers have raised concerns about the election of China, Cuba and Russia to the body. Saudi Arabia was a candidate, but was not elected. The US withdrew from the HRC in 2018; many observers regretted the US decision...

To create the feeling of interaction during the virtual UN Women Town Hall Meeting with Civil Society (October 19, 2020), the organizers used Mentimeter, an interesting tool which was new to me. Participants were invited to respond to two questions using one word, and the responses were represented graphically. The words which were most often used were displayed larger. This...