Right from the start, CSW66 seemed to be a closed shop. NGOs, activists and grassroots organisations were given just two days’ notice about access to the UN building in New York. For people in the Global South who face tougher travel restrictions and resource constraints, this left no time to organise visas or arrange travel.
The resulting absence of young people, Indigenous communities, women with disabilities, trans and gender-nonconforming people, and women living in rural areas meant there was a noticeable disconnect between the session in New York and the lived realities and expertise of communities most impacted by the climate crisis.
Climate inaction is a feminist issue
Throughout the CSW66 negotiations, EU member states, Canada, Australia and the US – countries that are usually outspoken on gender issues – refused to address climate change as their historical responsibility. Because they pushed back against important commitments, the summit’s final text failed to reflect the urgent need for action and the key demands of Pacific and African feminists.
Wanun Permpibul, director of Climate Watch Thailand, said that CSW66 was also “a missed opportunity to carry forward the discussion on climate finance, especially for loss and damage, [… to help] those on the ground who have already been bearing the cost of climate change from historical emissions.”
Global South feminists are demanding that Global North countries compensate communities who have already lost their homes and livelihoods from floods, droughts, heatwaves and rising sea levels. The most marginalised and most affected communities need to be prioritised, and funds need to be accessed directly by women-led autonomous groups.
Despite seeing themselves as champions of women’s and LGBTIQ rights, many Global North countries showed little regard for the immense and disproportionate impact faced by women and communities from the regions most vulnerable to climate inaction.
A number of these states, including Canada, Australia, France and Sweden, have recently adopted a “feminist foreign policy”. In cherry-picking and supporting only particular aspects of gender equality, while avoiding accountability for harm caused by their extractive, neoliberal and (neo)colonial policies, we might ask: is this label anything more than a branding exercise?
CitizenGo and anti-rights messages
Ultra-conservative anti-rights groups, obsessed with blocking progress on rights relating to gender and sexuality, tried to take up as much space as they could at CSW66.
One strategy they use to gain broader public support is the selective co-option of progressive agendas and discourses. For example, this year, groups including the US’s Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM) and Canada’s Campaign Life Coalition emphasised the need to reject “population control” as a solution to climate change.
But rather than outlining the colonial and racist nature of population control arguments – as feminists do – anti-rights groups use this narrative to deny the right to abortion and erase human rights for women, trans and non-binary people overall. Often aligned with conservative economic and corporate agendas, they have little interest in either causes of or solutions to climate change.
The presence of anti-rights actors at previous CSW sessions has been widely documented. They have set up shop in human rights spaces for years, since at least Beijing+5, the historic international gender summit held in 2000.
‘Rights at Risk’, a 2021 report by the Observatory on the Universality of Rights, explains what feminist groups have observed in UN spaces in the last decade: anti-rights groups are increasingly well organised, well funded and work across borders to infiltrate global policy spaces.
In the last week of CSW66, policymakers and politicians in New York were greeted by the sight of six buses carrying the anti-abortion message “equality begins in the womb”, alongside a demand to erase paragraphs on sexual and reproductive health rights from an early draft of the conference’s agreed conclusions.
The stunt was organised by CitizenGo, a Christian anti-rights group that originated in Spain but now operates internationally. Although it describes itself as a “community of active citizens who work together […] to defend and promote life, family and liberty”, in reality CitizenGo is linked to ultra-conservative political party Vox in Spain and controversial Catholic secret society El Yunque in Mexico, and has coordinated campaigns against reproductive health bills and policies in Kenya.
CitizenGo operates primarily through an online petition platform to push an anti-LGBTIQ, anti-abortion agenda, but it regularly carries out offline actions to boost impact too. These include the large anti-trans and anti-abortion tour buses parked outside the UN in 2019. That same year, a CitizenGo petition led to the coordinated harassment of a CSW session facilitator, who had more than 1,000 anti-abortion text messages sent to her phone.
Feminists fight back
There is some good news, though. This year, the activities of anti-rights actors were curtailed; those who had engaged in digital harassment or violence in previous CSW sessions were barred by organisers from accessing some of the fringe events held alongside the main meetings.
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