No Backlash to Women’s Rights - March and Rally at UN CSW69

No Backlash to Women’s Rights - March and Rally at UN CSW69

Stand up for gender equity and rights for ALL women!

We gather to say, We Won’t Go Back! We Stand up for Women’s Rights, Workers’ Rights, Trans Rights, the Rights of Occupied Peoples, Migrant Rights! We denounce the rise of racism and sexism and roll back of efforts to address inequality of opportunity due to historic, systemic exclusion. We insist on sexual and reproductive healthcare for all women and gender-diverse people. We insist that the climate crisis, the existential crisis of our era, must urgently be addressed. We insist on ALL Rights for ALL Women!

Women’s rights activists from around the world will be in New York for the 69th UN Commission on the Status of Women, which will review progress made towards gender equality thirty years after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. We gather at a time of resurgence of authoritarianism and erosion of democratic norms. As military coups, violent wars, human-induced climate disasters unfold producing increasing displacement and dispossession, we rally to counter the tide of backlash against women, migrants, Trans people, public sector workers, women workers, occupied peoples, Black and brown people. We gather to affirm climate justice, racial justice, gender justice, trade justice, labor rights, women’s reproductive choice. We gather to say, “We won’t go back!” To say NO to the Backlash. To affirm Human Rights for All.

The Beijing Platform for Action, adopted in 1995, affirmed the goal of gender equality for women in all of our diversity. Yet thirty years later, human rights are on the decline along with the power of the multilateral system and international law itself. There is shrinking civic space and power grabs to dismantle the role of the state in delivering social protection, attacks on human rights defenders and suppression of speech.

We are witnessing extreme nativism, and the criminalization and demonization of migrants. We see the roll back of sexual and reproductive health and rights, alongside institutionalized misogyny and discrimination against Queer and Black and Indigenous People of Color. Wars and armed conflict continue to have a devastating toll. Climate skepticism denies human-made crises, and their disproportionate impact on marginalized communities in the Global South, who often lack the resources to adapt and recover. These climate crises are also connected to extractive, colonial, and patriarchal systems of governance and production that feed conflict and displacement.

This reality is also creating a care crisis, where women shoulder the burden of paid and unpaid labor in filling the gaps, caring for aging populations, migrating for work only to face intense exploitation and abuse, the hollowing out of public healthcare in the Global South as healthcare workers migrate, and increased pressures on women in the context of climate crises.

We Won’t Go Back! No Backlash to Women’s Rights. All Rights for All Women!

The organizers reserve the right to ask people to take down signs that do not reflect the messages of the rally and the values of the co-organizers.

Convening Organizations:

• ACT Alliance
• Alianza Americas
• DAWN
• International Domestic Workers Federation
• International Trade Union Confederation
• MADRE
• National Nurses United (US)
• Public Services International
• Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
• United Women in Faith
• WEDO
• Women in Migration Network

Organizations that would like to endorse the event, please email [email protected] with “rally endorsement” in the subject line. Pending confirmation of the organizers, your organization’s name will be listed on promotional material. We request that all endorsing organizations assist with outreach for the event and social media coverage.

Endorsements:

• Akina Mama wa Afrika
• American Friends Service Committee
• Gender at Work
• Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees
• IPAS
• National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (US)
• New Women Connectors
• RESPECT Network
• Transnational Migration Platform - Europe (TMP-E)
• US Campaign for Burma
• Women’s League of Burma

If you are joining us for the brief march, gather by 12:15pm at Ralph Bunch Plaza (First Avenue and 43rd St.) by the "Isaiah Wall." We will march across 42nd St and up Second Avenue to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza (47th St. at Second Avenue).

The rally will take place at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza near Second Avenue from 1:00 - 2:00pm.

Host or Publisher Women in Migration Network/ WIMN