People, Power, and Rights
The challenges of the past five years have included the minimisation of state obligations towards women and gender-diverse people as complete rights holders, replaced with the encouragement of divisions and polarities amongst people. This has often entailed discourses that construct identities along dominant national and racialised lines, ‘othering’ and vilifying other groups in opposition, and diminishing the political, economic, and social protections for vulnerable communities, leading to marginalisation of human rights agendas and claims.
As such, this broad theme of People, Power, and Rights covers the realisation of rights for vulnerable communities—particularly those facing increasing criminalisation of their identities, deepening discrimination and human rights violations on the basis of disability, race, gender identity, nationality and/or migration status, among other signifiers—and centres state obligations and their role in ensuring equality and non-discrimination. This approach also anticipates the need for strategies located around women’s groups’ capacity to lead constructive meaningful engagement with actors on their international obligations on women’s rights, while acknowledging and dismantling exclusionary practices within feminist and women’s rights movements that reinforce white supremacist, neoliberal, and ableist norms and structures.