News

The 62nd session of the UN Human Rights Council took place from 15 June to 7 July 2026. The ongoing liquidity crisis continues to affect the United Nations, significantly impacting the Council’s functioning and space for meaningful civil society participation. In addition, anti-rights actors continue occupying this space and bringing their agenda to side events, resolutions and statements during plenaries. It is crucial for feminist activists from different regions to continue to make visible their demands within the Council and to actively hold states and other actors accountable for their human rights obligations. The SRI participated in the session through delivering statements, conducting advocacy with States and joining calls for accountability from other feminist and civil society organizations on a wide range of issues.

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. 

Akahata makes this statement on behalf of the Sexual Rights Initiative.   We receive with deep concern this report from the Special Rapporteur.   The report establishes three criteria for recognizing women as mothers in her report. None of them acknowledges the motherhood of the lesbian and bisexual women who were not pregnant with their own children but who form co-maternal families in which their lesbian or bisexual partners were pregnant. This is different from being an adoptive mother.  

Action Canada delivers this statement on behalf of the Sexual Rights Initiative.  Sports play an important role in the lives of women and girls in all their diversity. It can foster confidence, leadership, health, participation, and a sense of belonging. However, to truly empower women and girls through sports, we must ensure that sporting spaces are accessible, inclusive, and safe for everyone. This includes transgender and gender-diverse people. Empowerment cannot be achieved through exclusion. 

Akahata makes this statement on behalf of SWAN and the Sexual Rights Initiative.  We welcome the Special Rapporteur’s report emphasizing the trend to weaponize freedom of expression against marginalized groups.  Across the CEECA region, governments are increasingly restricting expression through vague provisions on child protection, public morality, traditional values, and extremism, which disproportionately affects excluded and stigmatized communities, including sex workers, women, and LGBT persons. 

We thank the Independent Expert for the report, which highlights the need to address violence against LBQ women by tackling the structural factors that sustain it and recognizing the limitations of exclusively punitive responses. We particularly appreciate the report’s intersectional approach, which links these forms of violence to the inequalities that this population faces in accessing rights, resources, and opportunities throughout their lives. 

Akahata makes this statement on behalf of the Sexual Rights Initiative.  We highly value this report, which makes a compelling case linking climate change to the need to transform food production systems. It clearly highlights the numerous negative impacts of large-scale food industries and the responsibility of governments to stop subsidizing these industries and instead support small-scale production, particularly that led by women, small farmers, and indigenous peoples.  

Action Canada delivers this statement on behalf of the Sexual Rights Initiative.  Domestic violence remains a pervasive human rights violation affecting women and girls in all their diversity. Across many regions, femicides and other forms of gender-based violence continue to occur at alarming rates and have become dangerously normalized. This cannot continue. 

Action Canada delivers this statement on behalf of the Sexual Rights Initiative.  Domestic violence remains a pervasive human rights violation affecting women and girls in all their diversity. Across many regions, femicides and other forms of gender-based violence continue to occur at alarming rates and have become dangerously normalized. This cannot continue. 

Action Canada delivers this statement on behalf of the Sexual Rights Initiative.  We thank the special rapporteur for this critical report, which rightly affirms that the right to health requires dignity as a normative and practical standard.   States' obligations extend far beyond health coverage. Health care must be available, accessible, acceptable and of good quality. Yet across the world, governments continue to adopt laws, policies and practices that undermine these obligations.