Schlagwort: Amnesty International

New briefing highlights acts of humanity and solidarity gaining momentum in the face of attacks

In the face of the global backlash against gender justice, and in the midst of the Epstein files scandal, an Amnesty International delegation led by Secretary General Agnès Callamard will call for more robust efforts to protect and advance the rights of women and girls at the 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70), which takes place in New York from March 9 to 19.

The Amnesty delegation will engage with UN member states, officials and civil society partners to press for strengthened access to justice for survivors of gender-based violence and meaningful accountability for its perpetrators, for protection of sexual and reproductive rights and stronger safeguards for women human rights defenders.

“This year’s Commission on the Status of Women comes at a particularly urgent time, with gender justice under attack across much of the globe and many women human rights defenders and feminist organisations unable to enter the United States,” said Agnès Callamard.

“Well-funded, highly coordinated anti-rights movements, directly supported or emboldened by the United States, Russia and too many other governments, are working to roll back decades of progress.

“Powerful states are weaponizing gender to justify repression and adoption of punitive laws. Corporate and other non-state actors are planting the seeds of moral panic by spreading hateful narratives and disinformation. Together, those forces aimed at control of women’s bodily autonomy, imposing a violent denial of rights, instilling fear and contributing to the shrinking of civic space.

“At the same time, the so-called ‘Epstein Files’ have exposed global criminal networks of the world’s most powerful men in politics, finance and culture who, for decades, have engaged with impunity in large-scale sexual exploitation and abuse of women and girls, corrupting governments, markets and societies, while entrenching abusive power. It is truly sickening to see how survivors are confronted with daunting barriers to truth, remedy and redress, as well as further victimization through the nonconsensual public disclosure of sensitive data. Grotesquely, the same structural inequality, misogyny and systemic impunity that impede their access to justice continue to shield those responsible for their abuse, as well as for wider abuse of women’s and girls’ rights the world over including the organised attacks on gender rights.

Powerful states are weaponizing gender to justify repression and adoption of punitive laws. Corporate and other non-state actors are planting the seeds of moral panic by spreading hateful narratives and disinformation. Together, those forces aimed at control of women’s bodily autonomy, imposing a violent denial of rights, instilling fear and contributing to the shrinking of civic space.

Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General

“CSW70 presents a critical opportunity for women human rights defenders, gender activists and member states to resist the systemic attacks on gender justice and women’s rights by naming the forces and actors behind the attacks, actively organising against them through collective actions and ensuring that accountability mechanisms can function as intended, without fear or favour.”

New briefing demonstrates global resistance

In a new briefing published today, Amnesty International highlights how, in one of the most challenging periods for women’s rights in recent history, global resistance against governments’ attacks on gender rights and their suppression of dissent is gaining momentum.

“The last year has shown that even when states fail in their duties to deliver, the collective power of communities can still defend, uphold and advance gender justice. Far from accepting defeat, or cowering to those threats, women, girls, LGBTI people and those who support them are standing tall and stepping up their work to expose, denounce and resist human rights abuses,” said Agnès Callamard.

“We are witnessing thousands of everyday acts of courage, leadership and solidarity. Our briefing documents the dedication of brave individuals fighting, for example, to secure a landmark court ruling affirming access to abortion for rape survivors in Malawi, demanding accountability for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, and resisting censorship in Afghanistan and China. Others are battling to extend sexual and reproductive rights in Latin America and ensure LGBTI people can exercise their rights to peaceful assembly in Hungary.

“Their examples show us that another world is possible. Their voices are particularly important this year, when due to safety concerns, border violence, visa and access restrictions alongside the funding crisis caused by the slashing of aid, so many partner organizations and human rights defenders cannot be present at CSW in New York. These pervasive inequities are severely limiting meaningful access to multilateral spaces.”

The last year has shown that even when states fail in their duties to deliver, the collective power of communities can still defend, uphold and advance gender justice. Far from accepting defeat, or cowering to those threats, women, girls, LGBTI people and those who support them are standing tall and stepping up their work to expose, denounce and resist human rights abuses

Agnès Callamard

The briefing, “Humanity Must Win: and it does when we stand together for gender justice”, details campaigns and initiatives from across the world that, despite systematic backlash by authorities, are nonetheless exposing human rights violations, promoting solidarity and driving progress towards accountability and justice.

The briefing outlines those human rights initiatives, including in:

• Afghanistan, where women journalists, including Zahra Joya, founder of Rukhshana Media, continue to resist the Taliban’s sweeping restrictions that have erased women from public life. Their reporting gives visibility to women who cannot speak openly, from the protesters who write their messages of resistance on walls in Kabul, to survivors of violence whose stories rarely reach the outside world.

• Burkina Faso, where, in 2025, following persistent civil society campaigning, the country adopted long-awaited reforms setting the minimum age of marriage at 18 and establishing consent between the two parties as the basis for any marriage.

• China, where feminist activists are resisting criminalization and surveillance even as authorities describe their movement as a political threat and subject them to censorship and repression.

• Gaza, where the brave work of human rights organizations helped expose the genocide committed by Israel, a step in the long road to justice. In March 2025, the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel has systematically used sexual, reproductive, and other gender-based violence against Palestinians and carried out “genocidal acts” by destroying women’s healthcare and reproductive health facilities and blocking access to essential care.

• Hungary, where around 300,000 people defied the authorities’ ban of the Budapest Pride march in June 2025. Under new legislation, the authorities can ban any assemblies advocating for LGBTI+ rights and depicting LGBTI themes, fine participants, criminalize organisers and identify marchers through facial recognition technology.

• Malawi, where, in 2025, Malawi’s High Court affirmed that denying a 14-year-old rape survivor access to a safe abortion violated her rights under the Gender Equality Act, in a landmark ruling that sets an important precedent in a country where abortion remains largely criminalized.

• Latin America, where activists from across the region have continued to defy attacks and attempts to roll back on hard won sexual and reproductive rights, particularly access to safe abortions.

The post Global: Amnesty chief calls on states to step up resistance to attacks on gender justice and women’s rights at CSW70 appeared first on Amnesty International.

Responding to Israel’s use of repeated, overly broad evacuation orders across Lebanon over the past four days, including to more than 100 villages and towns in the country’s south and east, as well as the entirety of Beirut’s southern suburbs, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, Kristine Beckerle, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International said today:

“Civilians in Lebanon are once again being ordered to flee en masse by a military that has repeatedly shown its willingness to inflict significant civilian harm through unlawful attacks in previous rounds of fighting. The sweeping evacuation orders have sown panic and terror, displaced hundreds of thousands of people and fuelled yet another humanitarian catastrophe for a population already exhausted and reeling from multiple crises.

“The overly broad warnings covering vast areas of Lebanon do not constitute effective guarantees of protection. They provide no meaningful information about where or when the Israeli military might strike and offer civilians nowhere near the level of guidance needed to make informed decisions about whether, or for how long, to flee. Many civilians, including older people, children, people with disabilities, cannot evacuate, or may have nowhere safe to go.

The sweeping evacuation orders have sown panic and terror, displaced hundreds of thousands of people and fuelled yet another humanitarian catastrophe for a population already exhausted and reeling from multiple crises.

Kristine Beckerle, MENA Deputy Director

“Issuing mass evacuation orders does not grant the Israeli military the right to treat these areas as open-fire zones, nor does it absolve Israel of its obligations under international humanitarian law to protect civilians and to take all feasible precautions to minimize harm to civilians, wherever they are. In the 24 hours since the mass evacuation order for Beirut’s southern suburbs, for example, the Israeli military has carried out repeated air strikes, many without warnings.

“The repeated use of overly broad warnings, paired with the Israeli military’s extensive destruction of civilian property in more than two dozen municipalities along Lebanon’s border both before and after a ceasefire was in place, raises serious concerns that some of these mass evacuation orders are intended to forcibly displace civilians, which is prohibited by international humanitarian law.

“The absolute impunity that Israel has enjoyed after previous rounds of fighting has paved the way for these same violations of international law to recur, once again placing civilians at grave risk. We urge parties to the conflict to uphold their obligations under international humanitarian law, to protect civilians and to refrain from unlawful attacks.”

Background

Less than 100 hours after fighting escalated in Lebanon, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, more than 300,000 people had been displaced across the country. As of 6 March, Lebanon’s Public Health Emergency Operations Centre, affiliated with the Ministry of Public Health, announced that 217 people had been killed and 798 injured since fighting escalated on 2 March, and that more than 110,000 of those displaced were in collective shelters.

Between 3-6 March the Israeli military issued a series of evacuation orders instructing residents of entire towns and villages in south Lebanon and areas of the Bekaa Valley to evacuate. These included one on 5 March in which Israel’s military ordered the entire population living south of the Litani River to leave “immediately” for their “safety”.

On 5 March, the Israeli military issued another blanket evacuation order, this time to all the residents of Dahieh, the densely populated southern suburbs of Beirut. As residents scrambled to flee, roads were clogged for hours, with fear-gripped residents escaping in cars or on foot carrying whatever they could.

Hezbollah and Israel engaged in cross-border hostilities after the group launched attacks into northern Israel following the outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Hamas in the occupied Gaza Strip in October 2023. Despite a ceasefire being agreed in 2024, Israel continued carrying out near-daily strikes, primarily in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa region, killing at least 127 civilians while the ceasefire was in place.

On 2 March 2026, Hezbollah launched a series of attacks into Israel in response to the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei following a US-Israeli attack on Iran. Since October 2023, Amnesty International has documented Israel’s unlawful attacks on civilians and civilian objects, use of white phosphorous and its extensive destruction in Lebanon’s border villages, as well as Hezbollah’s repeated firing of unguided rockets into civilian areas in Israel. All must be investigated as war crimes.

The post Lebanon: Israeli military’s overly broad mass evacuation orders sowing panic and fuelling humanitarian suffering appeared first on Amnesty International.

The new Criminal Regulation recently endorsed by the Taliban leader will further entrench violence and discrimination against women, Amnesty International said in a new legal analysis documenting its wide-ranging and regressive impact on human rights.

The “Criminal Procedure Regulation of the Courts”, which lays out punishments and sentencing for a range of vague and overly broad offences, criminalizes domestic violence only in cases where a woman has suffered a broken bone or visible injuries. The decree also prescribes a three-month prison sentence for any woman who regularly visits family members without her husband’s permission and who refuses a court order to return home.

The regulation also prescribes harsh punishments for religious non-compliance, more severe punishments for people of lower social status and recognizes slavery. Other provisions authorize the destruction of property as a form of punishment, institutionalize torture and other ill-treatment through corporal punishment, and sanction the death penalty for a greater number of offences.

“The regulation makes an already repressive legal system even more draconian. Women and girls are, of course, among the most affected, with provisions that normalize domestic violence and place even greater restrictions on their movement and autonomy,” said Smriti Singh, Amnesty International’s South Asia Director.

The regulation makes an already repressive legal system even more draconian

Smriti Singh, Amnesty International’s South Asia Director

“Provisions on strict religious observance and the scaling of punishment depending on social class will entrench discrimination and target the country’s most marginalized and economically disadvantaged people.”

“We call on the Taliban to immediately revoke or revise this repressive regulation and bring it in conformity with international human rights standards. We also urge the international community to unequivocally condemn the regulation, and pressure the Taliban to end their ongoing widespread and systematic violations of human rights.”

The analysis highlights some of the central draconian provisions of the regulation and the challenges they pose, as well as how they will impact human rights in at least seven areas. The areas, and some of the key issues covered, are highlighted below:

Women’s Rights: How the changes outlined above remove essential safety mechanisms for victims and survivors of gender-based violence.

Freedom of Religion, Belief, Thought, and Expression: The impact on religious minorities of severe new penalties for deviating from the Hanifi School of Sunni Islam that the Taliban claim to adhere to, and the designation of beliefs contrary to the Sunni Branch of Islam as heretical.

Torture and other Ill-treatment: How the regulation provisions prescribe torture and other ill-treatment in the form of flagging or lashing for a wide range of offences.

Death Penalty: The prescription of the death penalty for a broad range of offences including ‘habitual sodomy’ based on a discretionary judgement from an Imam that it is in the ‘public interest’.

International Fair Trial Standards: How vague definitions of offences empower the Taliban judges and authorities to arbitrarily define and implement them, which will further undermine the justice process.

Equality Before the Law: The division of offenders into four categories with a sliding scale of punishments based on social hierarchy.

Slavery: How the wording of some provisions appears to recognize ownership over certain individuals, and expressly recognize slavery

Background

On 5 January, the Taliban leader endorsed the regulation and ordered its publication in the Official Gazette, where laws and other legislative documents are published to ensure public awareness and accessibility. On 8 January, the Taliban’s Supreme Court Secretariat (Dar -al-Insha,), circulated the regulation to the members of the Supreme Court, directorates, and courts for its implementation. Though the regulation is not yet published in the official Gazette, the Taliban stated on 23 January that it would be published soon. Amnesty International contacted the de facto Taliban authorities on 19 February seeking an official copy of the regulation and any accompanying materials for this analysis, and to determine whether the regulation has been effectively enforced, but no response was provided.

On 15 February, a media outlet reported that the implementation of the regulation had led to the prosecution of an individual in Badghis province for insulting the Taliban leader.

The post Afghanistan: New criminal regulation targets women and minority groups with ever-harsher punishments appeared first on Amnesty International.

Governments around the world are rolling back decades of progress on gender equality resulting in increasing attacks on reproductive rights, the silencing of feminist voices, funding cuts for women’s rights organizations, and much more.

Ensuring and strengthening access to justice for all women and girls is more important than ever, and will be top of the agenda when UN member states convene for the 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women from 9 to 19 March.

Here are eight areas in which Amnesty International has been campaigning for gender equality and justice. These wins take different forms – from landmark court rulings and legal reforms to hard-won recognition, accountability and resistance in the face of injustice. As long as we don’t give up, humanity can – and will – win against discrimination, gender-based violence and injustice!

Burkina Faso

© Sophie Garcia

Burkina Faso has one of the highest rates of early marriage in the world, often leading to girls being forced to drop out of school to take care of their homes and husbands. Girls who are married off at a young age are also more likely to suffer domestic violence and health complications in childbirth and pregnancy. Following years of campaigning by Amnesty International and its partners, Burkina Faso adopted long-awaited reforms in 2025, which set the minimum age for marriage at 18 for both girls and boys and established consent as the basis for any marriage. New provisions on inheritance rights, which eliminate gender discrimination against women and girls, also mark meaningful progress.

Dominican Republic

© Erickson Polanco / AFP Collaborator

In November 2025, Amnesty International published a report exposing the false narrative used by the government of the Dominican Republic to justify a crackdown on undocumented migrants that has seen hundreds of pregnant and breast-feeding women deported back to Haiti. It came after anti-immigration measures were announced by President Abinader, including a requirement that, in order to access hospital treatment, foreign patients must provide identification, a passport with a valid visa, a work card issued by the Directorate of Migration and proof of home address. Amnesty International continues to campaign for the repeal of these health protocols, which are deterring undocumented pregnant women from seeking ante- and postnatal care and placing their lives at risk. We are also calling for the suspension of the arbitrary detention and deportation of Haitians, particularly pregnant women and children, as a result of this new policy.

Haiti

During 2025, Amnesty International documented gang violence against girls and women in Port-au-Prince and other communities. In a report drawing on interviews with 112 people, including 51 children, Amnesty documented abuses and violations in eight communes of the West Department – from the recruitment and use of children in gangs, to rape and other forms of sexual violence meted out to women and girls. It also presented a summary of its findings to the office of Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé in December 2024, in a bid to stop the cycles of violence and ensure justice for victims and their families. 

France

© Dimitar DILKOFF / AFP

Official statistics in France indicate that only 6% of victims report cases of rape, attempted rape and/or sexual assault. To find out why some of the most vulnerable in society do not come forward to report these crimes, Amnesty International interviewed migrant women, transgender women and sex workers about their experiences of attempting to report sexual violence in France. In its 2024 briefing, ‘Go Home, It’ll Blow Over’, Amnesty exposed how structural discrimination, stigma and institutional failures routinely prevent survivors from accessing justice, even within a legal system that formally guarantees their rights. The research found widespread refusals by police to register complaints, discriminatory treatment, lack of interpreters, inadequate support services, and harmful gendered and racialized stereotypes. For undocumented migrant women and sex workers in particular, reporting sexual violence can result in detention, deportation, or further abuse, creating a chilling effect that pushes survivors away from justice altogether.

Gaza

© Wahaj Bani Moufleh / Middle East Images / Middle East Images via AFP

In March 2025, the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel has systematically used sexual, reproductive, and other gender-based violence against Palestinians and carried out “genocidal acts” by destroying women’s healthcare and reproductive health facilities and blocking access to essential care. In September 2025, it found that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, including through the imposition of measures intended to prevent births. These findings followed Amnesty’s own December 2024 report “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza”, which documented killings, serious bodily and mental harm, and conditions of life deliberately imposed to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, “in whole or in part,” including gendered harms resulting from the assault. Alongside women human rights defenders and feminist movements, Amnesty International continues to document abuses, advocate for accountability and mobilize support for Palestinian women and girls.

Malawi

In 2025, Malawi’s High Court ruled that denying a 14-year-old rape survivor access to a safe abortion had violated her rights under the Gender Equality Act. In its landmark judgment, the court awarded damages to the survivor and affirmed that access to a safe abortion is essential to protecting the lives, health and dignity of women and girls. The ruling set an important precedent in a country where abortion remains largely criminalized – the only exception is when it is performed to save the life of a pregnant woman. This colonial-era draconian law means many adolescents and survivors of sexual violence are left with no safe options.

Latin America

In 2025, the United Nations Human Rights Committee issued landmark rulings finding that Ecuador and Nicaragua violated the human rights of three girls who were raped, denied an abortion and forced into motherhood, and later that year issued a further ruling concerning Guatemala. In its far-reaching decisions, the committee found that the girls had been subjected to situations amounting to torture. For the first time, it recognized that forced motherhood interrupts and hinders girls’ personal, educational and professional goals, and severely restricts their right to a dignified life. The committee called for states to amend legislation to ensure access to safe, legal abortion, especially in cases involving sexual violence or risks to the life or health of the girl, woman or pregnant person – and to provide reparations for survivors to help them rebuild their lives. The cases form part of the ‘Girls, Not Mothers’ campaign, of which Amnesty International is a founding and active member.

Nepal

© AFP

Despite laws prohibiting it, caste-based discrimination continues to be a feature of everyday life in Nepal. Not only does it fuel violence and prejudice against millions of Dalits and other members of minority communities, but it also robs them of justice as the police are less likely to promptly – or effectively – investigate crimes against minority groups. However, there was a breakthrough in 2023, when the West Rukum District Court delivered a historic verdict, convicting 26 individuals for murder and caste-based discrimination in the killing of Nabaraj BK and five others. The six men, many of whom were from the Dalit community, had been beaten to death by a mob in 2020 after allegations of Nabaraj’s inter-caste relationship with a girl from a dominant caste. Alongside Dalit families and activists, Amnesty International continues to lobby the Nepali government to put in place effective protections for Dalit communities.

The post 8 wins against gender-based discrimination, violence and injustice appeared first on Amnesty International.