On 17 February 2026, the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) released a statement sharing its concerns on the United Nations Financial and Liquidity Crisis, in light of the crisis’s impact on the operations of their mandate.
IWRAW Asia Pacific has supported the CEDAW Committee and the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights to facilitate NGO engagement in the CEDAW process since 1997, and we share the Committee’s concerns, with specific regard to the unique impacts on meaningful NGO participation.
In January 2026, the International Service for Human Rights (ISHR) published several pieces detailing the impacts of the UN80 agenda and the budget cuts proposed by the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ). The budget cuts, part of the UN’s cost-saving and efficiency measures, were approved by States at the UN General Assembly’s Fifth Committee (5C) meeting, included “cuts to the budget of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) of around 15%”, which hosts most of the UN human rights frameworks, mechanisms and systems.
Over the past two years, IWRAW Asia Pacific has witnessed the adverse impacts of the UN’s financial crisis on the CEDAW process, a process which is vital for the monitoring of States’ accountability to realising women’s human rights. In 2025 alone, the liquidity crisis has resulted in:
- Late confirmation of the 91st CEDAW session
- Cancellation of CEDAW Committee’s third session in 2025
- Cancellation of in-person pre-session working group (PSWG) meetings and the last-minute adaptation of its modality into an online format
At the receiving end of the abovementioned effects were women’s rights organisations, feminist collectives and broader civil society organisations, which served as collateral to a crisis caused by States’ pushback against the UN’s human rights agenda.
In June 2025, the 91st CEDAW session (during which Afghanistan, Botswana, Chad, Ireland, Mexico, San Marino, and Thailand were under review), was only confirmed by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights less than a month before the start of the session, and almost a week after the deadline for NGOs to submit their shadow reports, due to uncertainty of funds. Leading up to the confirmation, NGOs were assumed to commit resources to participate in the session, even in the absence of clear confirmation. Given that NGOs had a brief, three-week period to undertake preparations for in-person engagement in Geneva, physical NGO participation in the session was significantly lower in comparison with previous sessions. Amidst already low numbers of participating NGOs, engagement of marginalised communities of women–such as Indigenous Women, women with disabilities, sex workers, trans women and persons, and ethnic minorities, amongst others–were disproportionately impacted by the acute lack of time and resources to plan their travels.
In October 2025, the CEDAW Committee was forced to cancel their third session of the year, which was tentatively slated to review Argentina, Czech Republic, El Salvador, Iraq, Lesotho, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Viet Nam. The session’s cancellation raised serious concerns over global accountability mechanisms and their effectiveness to assess and address the status of women’s human rights in a time-sensitive manner. Given that ratified States are periodically reviewed at least every four years, as obligated by the Convention, delayed reviews–which equal delayed reporting–increases the burden of NGOs to encompass over four years of policy and legislative assessment in their alternative reports. According to the OHCHR’s Report on ‘Compliance by States parties with their reporting obligations to international human rights treaty bodies’, in 2025 the CEDAW Committee received a total of 33 reports that were yet to be considered as of May 2025, and a total of 10 States were overdue on their periodic reports. The cancellation of sessions will only further exacerbate the backlogs of reports to be considered by the CEDAW Committee, and in turn, delay State accountability to women’s human rights agendas.
Echoing the concerns of the CEDAW Committee, and of feminist movements worldwide, IWRAW Asia Pacific urges States to:
- Pay their regular financial contributions to the UN.
- Reverse budget cuts to the human rights mechanisms, including the OHCHR, allowing for human rights bodies, such as the CEDAW Committee, to effectively undertake their mandate.
- Uphold the commitment of State obligation to the UN’s human rights agenda to fulfill the realisation of human rights for all.
States must fulfill their obligations to human rights, and this means safeguarding the United Nations and its human rights systems. We can not afford to abandon the UN and allow it to be dismantled in the face of regression. Human rights must be realised. Accountability must be pursued. States must pay their dues.
For more information about this statement, please contact IWRAW Asia Pacific’s Strategic Communications Lead, Pravind Premnath at pravind@iwraw-ap.org.