Global South Women’s Forum 2025: Rightfully Ours!
“We commit to creating a strategic space that is both living and growing; that is organic, dynamic and symbiotic” – Outcome document of the inaugural Global South Women’s Forum, 2016
For over 30 years, IWRAW Asia Pacific has lived its mandate of advancing the realisation of human rights, through mobilising grassroots women’s movements for the implementation of universal normative standards, particularly as conceptualised and articulated in the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). In undertaking this role, in addition to our work on building and sharing thematic and functional expertise on the implementation of multilateral mechanisms and systems, IWRAW Asia Pacific acts as the coordinating NGO for civil society engagement with the CEDAW committee to ensure the global accountability process for domestic realisation of obligations undertaken by state parties to key international human rights treaties. To this extent, we have also worked closely with other gender equality and human rights mandates across the Special Procedures and other treaty bodies. Ultimately, our aim has been to build a political base to ensure women’s human rights are being fulfilled and realised at every level (de jure and de facto).
Our work has enabled the CEDAW committee and other treaty bodies to grapple with the wide scope of realities of structural systems of, and exacerbating, exclusion such as racism, sexism, the climate crisis, and poverty and wealth disparity around the world, with an emphasis on the Third World. While we welcome decades of progressive jurisprudence which has emerged from the UN human rights framework, we can not ignore that these frameworks are not isolated, and that they exist within a larger ecosystem of multilateralism, which is being actively dismantled by anti-rights forces and actors so as to subvert the upholding and protecting of very norms they were built to promote.
While analysing the dismantling of the UN, we must also interrogate the grounds on which it was created. In 1945, the creation of the UN ushered in a new world order of multilateral cooperation between ‘peace-loving States’1 UN Charter Article 4(1) built on the promise and protection of international peace, human rights, and fundamental liberties, amongst others, in a ‘post-war world’2 UN Charter Articles 1(1-4) and 2(1). However, its creation was inherently flawed as the Charter only came into force once ratified by China, France, Russia (formerly known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), the United Kingdom, and the United States of America3 UN Charter Article 19(3).
The realities of 2025 are radically different from 1945, where the distribution of power between states has been upended, and so many more self-determined sovereign nations4 There were 51 United Nations member states represented in the General Assembly in 1950 and as of 2025 there are 193. must weigh into what is a just global order. Yet, this old architecture remains, and the champions of the UN and a peace-based world order are themselves the primary drivers of war, genocide, neoliberalism, and the anti-gender agenda in multilateral spaces, complicit in the subversion of rights. At the same time, some of the nations that are upholding self-determination are attacking human rights defenders, suppressing rights and making it more dangerous for individuals and groups of individuals to demand and uphold rights.
IWRAW Asia Pacific acknowledges the increasing loss of faith in the multilateral systems, particularly amongst feminist and human rights organisations, who are interrogating its complicity in upholding colonial and neocolonial frameworks—and we share many of the same concerns. We agree with the Global South feminist critiques of the UN that call for a system-wide change (or reform), and hear the clamour to “burn it all down”. We also acknowledge that included in the voices asking for reform and change are valid concerns at the national, community, and grassroots level; activists, especially those from and representing marginalised communities who are often invisibilised at the national level, demand the retention of these spaces and systems in the UN as they remain among the only avenues through which they are able to fight for their rights.
As IWRAW Asia Pacific, we are clear that we want to hold the space for state accountability at the local, regional, and global levels—accountability to the global communities, across movements, for the fulfillment of their obligations towards ensuring human rights of all people, particularly vulnerable and marginalised communities in their jurisdictions. As a feminist human rights organisation, we are clear that accountability and transparency are primary tools for dismantling authoritarian powers that actors, such as state and large corporations, hold over ordinary people, and global oversight of these actions is imperative for the protection, realisation, and advancement of their rights.
The human rights norms and standards as well as the upkeep of humanitarian law has been entrusted to the UN; however, there are other significant streams from which these have emerged including civil society organising, and jurisprudence from regional5 The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, European Court of Human Rights, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rightsand national courts.
These norms and values reflect the lived realities of the exploited, vulnerable, marginalised, and invisibilised communities. States are bound by legal commitments they have made and built the system in partnership with civil society actors to ensure that these grow and evolve dynamically in line with the principles on which the international community has signed off.
Universal norms and standards of human rights have been hard fought for, and cannot and will not be ceded. These are our feminist commons, and these are what we will defend in the face of the undoing of multilateralism.
It is within this ethos, we convened the Global South Women’s Forum 2025, ‘Rightfully Ours!’ in November 2025.
Commemorating the 10th iteration of GSWF, we took stock of where nine years of alternative organising has gotten us, and where has engaging with multilateralism as the feminist movement landed us in 2025. Are we working in favour of the system or are we–rightfully–making the system work for us (if we want it to)? Even if the system is failing us, how can we take up the international law norms and use them consistently across systems?
As we co-created the Forum with our allies, we hoped one of its many organic results will be shared principles set by Global South feminists which we can and will use together—in solidarity, allyship, and transparent collaboration—to engage with multilateralism where needed, to resist and reject it when required, and to ultimately build our own alternatives.
This position paper was authored by IWRAW Asia Pacific’s Tulika Srivastava (Executive Director) and Pravind Premnath (Strategic Communications, Knowledge Building and Campaigns Lead) on behalf of the Global South Women’s Forum 2025 organising team.
Footnotes
- 1UN Charter Article 4(1)
- 2UN Charter Articles 1(1-4) and 2(1)
- 3UN Charter Article 19(3)
- 4There were 51 United Nations member states represented in the General Assembly in 1950 and as of 2025 there are 193.
- 5The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, European Court of Human Rights, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights