Georgette Virgo
Photo Courtesy of UN Women
The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) stands as the principal global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of the rights and empowerment of women.
The 69th CSW session this past March – which acknowledged 30 years since the passing of the Beijing Declaration, a watershed moment to measure achievements and chart new directions, and the 25th anniversary of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda as enshrined in United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 – carried a special weight. This anniversary arrived during a challenging period when women’s rights face mounting threats, including rising violence against women.
A Legacy of Progress
Started in 1946 under the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), CSW has spent decades shaping international standards on women’s rights while documenting their lived experiences across the globe. Its work has powered landmark agreements that have dramatically improved women’s lives. CSW successfully advocated for the inclusion of women in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a move that cemented the recognition women deserve. During the 1960s, CSW redirected its focus toward community development and family planning initiatives, examining how technological changes affected the lives of women across the globe.
CSW has continuously monitored global advancement while responding to emerging challenges, like climate change’s disproportionate impact on women and the persistent scourge of violence against women. The formation of UN Women in 2010 strengthened these efforts by bringing together various UN resources dedicated to the equality of women under one umbrella.
CSW69: A Pivotal Moment
The 69th session, held from March 10 to 21, 2025, represented a defining chapter in the struggle for women’s equality. As delegates gathered, they faced the dual task of honestly assessing progress while confronting stubborn barriers to implementation. The 69th session launched with the adoption of a Political Declaration, which reaffirmed the commitments of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, and recommitted Member States to eliminating all forms of violence against women and girls, including digital violence, online harassment, and cyberbullying. CSW69 also established a multi-year work program that will guide future CSW activities.
This year’s session highlighted the complex political dynamics at play in global women’s rights advocacy. While some nations have made remarkable strides in areas like political representation and economic participation, others have witnessed troubling rollbacks of basic protections. This uneven progress reveals how cultural, religious, and political factors continue to shape women’s experiences differently across regions.
Around the world, hard-won gains face new challenges. Sexual and reproductive rights, long recognized as essential to women’s autonomy, face renewed threats in many regions. The Beijing+30 Action Agenda seeks to counter this backlash by reinvigorating global commitment to achieving equality between men and women by 2030, working in harmony with the broader Sustainable Development Goals.
Beyond Beijing: Reimagining Equality
While CSW delegates gathered for this milestone session, they faced fundamental questions about how to advance women’s rights in an increasingly polarized world. The original Beijing framework, while pivotal, emerged in a very different global context. Today’s advocates must navigate new geopolitical tensions while addressing interconnected challenges like climate change, economic inequality, and democratic backsliding.
Digital spaces have also created both new opportunities and dangers for women’s rights. While technology has amplified women’s voices and built powerful transnational networks, online harassment and technology-facilitated abuse have emerged as serious threats to women’s participation in public discourse.
The Beijing+30 Action Agenda acknowledges these complexities while reaffirming core principles. It calls for a renewed focus on eliminating violence against women and girls, closing persistent economic gaps, and removing barriers to women’s political participation. Significantly, it also emphasizes the importance of addressing intersecting forms of discrimination, recognizing that factors like race, disability, and migration status shape women’s experiences of inequality.
“Equality, development and peace for all women, everywhere,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres reminded delegates at the opening session. This vision from Beijing remains as powerful today as it was three decades ago, even as the pathways to realizing it have grown more complicated.
Carrying a Legacy, Confronting a Challenge, Shaping a Future
The outcomes of CSW69 will reverberate well beyond the conference halls. The agreements reached will influence national policies, direct international funding, and provide advocacy tools for grassroots women’s organizations worldwide. Perhaps most importantly, they will signal whether the international community can transcend growing ideological divisions to reaffirm shared commitments to women’s fundamental rights.
CSW’s work reflects a profound truth about social change: progress is neither automatic nor irreversible. Each advancement in women’s rights has been won through determined advocacy, often in the face of powerful resistance. As CSW marks this significant anniversary, it carries forward a legacy of persistence in the face of pushback, pragmatism in the face of polarization, and a solid belief that equality between men and women remains both an urgent moral imperative and a practical necessity for building just, peaceful societies.
Success of this conference will not be found in its formal declarations but in whether it can catalyze genuine action to improve women’s lives. As delegates prepare to adopt the Beijing+30 Action Agenda, they carry the hopes of generations of women’s rights advocates, and the responsibility to translate words into tangible change for women and girls in every corner of the world.