Mr. President,
Action Canada makes this statement together with SWAN on behalf of the Sexual Rights Initiative.
We welcome the report’s recognition that digital technologies and AI increasingly reinforce existing inequalities and expose women and girls to new forms of violence, surveillance, and exclusion from public life.
Across the CEECA region, women continue to face discrimination that undermines their bodily autonomy, safety, and equal participation in society, which disproportionately affects sex workers, LGBT women, and other vulnerable groups.
Eastern Europe continues to experience some of the highest levels of violence against women in Europe. Some of the recent examples include Latvia with the highest recorded femicide rate in the European Union; Russia, where access to abortion is widely restricted in practice despite its legality; or Lithuania that seeks to adopt a harmful legal model targeting sex workers and increasing their exposure to violence.
These examples demonstrate that women in the region already face significant barriers to safety, justice, and autonomy. Digital technologies increasingly compound these harms. Women from marginalized communities are exposed to online surveillance, doxxing, non-consensual disclosure of personal information, cyber-harassment, and other forms of technology-facilitated gender-based violence. For sex workers in particular, such practices can result in stalking, extortion, loss of income, barriers to accessing services, and withdrawal from public participation.
SWAN and its partners have documented cases of violence, torture, and ill-treatment against sex workers and transgender women in the region, including in Uzbekistan. In such contexts, digital surveillance and online targeting do not occur in isolation. They reinforce existing patterns of discrimination and violence, further excluding marginalized women from public life and civic participation.
Thank you.