Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women Opens Ninety-Third Session in Geneva
The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women this morning opened its ninety-third session, hearing a statement from a representative of the United Nations Secretary-General and adopting its agenda for the session. During the session, the Committee will review the reports of Angola, Cabo Verde, the Cook Islands, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Paraguay, the Republic of Moldova and Togo.
Opening the session, Andrea Ori, Chief of the Groups in Focus Section, Human Rights Treaties Branch, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and representative of the Secretary-General, said that due to the United Nations liquidity crisis, the Committee had been able to hold only two sessions in 2026, rather than the three sessions that were normally scheduled. As a result, this session, originally planned for June 2026, was taking place only now. Mr. Ori said he was pleased that, despite these constraints, the Committee could now convene to continue its essential work.
Nahla Haidar, Committee Chairperson, said in opening remarks that around the globe, there was a convergence of crises: armed conflicts, autocratic regimes, unprecedented economic inequalities and humanity having reached the tipping point of climate change. The consequences of these crises were disproportionately borne by women and girls. There was also a well-orchestrated backlash against gender equality across regions, the erosion of sexual and reproductive health rights, shrinking civic space, attacks on women human rights defenders, and rising levels of gender-based violence, both offline and online.
In the face of these challenges, Ms. Haidar said, the Committee was needed more than ever to hold governments accountable for women’s and girls’ equal rights. It needed to continue monitoring the implementation of the Convention and protecting the integrity of it and the other human rights mechanisms in these challenging times.
The Committee adopted the agenda and programme of work of the session, and the Chair and Committee Experts then discussed the activities they had undertaken since the last session.
Ms. Haidar briefed the Committee on the work of the Pre-Sessional Working Group, and Jelena Pia-Comella, Committee Rapporteur on follow-up to concluding observations, also briefed the Committee.
The Committee’s ninety-third session is being held from 5 to 30October. All documents relating to the Committee’s work, including reports submitted by States parties, can be found on the session’s webpage. Meeting summary releases can be found here. The webcast of the Committee’s public meetings can be accessed via the UN Web TV webpage.
The Committee will next meet with the representatives of national human rights institutions and non-governmental organizations of Kazakhstan, the Cook Islands, Kenya and the Republic of Moldova, the States scheduled for review in the first week of the session, at 3 p.m. today, Monday, 5 October.
Opening Statement
ANDREA ORI, Chief of the Groups in Focus Section, Human Rights Treaties Branch, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Representative of the Secretary-General, opening the ninety-third session, said that regrettably, due to the United Nations liquidity crisis, the Committee had been able to hold only two sessions in 2026, rather than the three sessions that were normally scheduled. As a result, this session, originally planned for June 2026, was taking place only now. Mr. Ori said he was pleased that, despite these constraints, the Committee could now convene to continue its essential work, including by holding dialogues with eight States parties and considering 10 lists of issues or lists of issues prior to reporting, five individual communications, a report on follow-up to individual communications, a draft inquiry report, as well as the draft general recommendation 41 on dismantling gender stereotypes, prejudices and stigma and the unequal power relations that sustained them.
The Committee was meeting at a time when the world was becoming increasingly polarised and divided. The treaty bodies were operating in a rapidly changing global and political landscape — one quite different from that when the first treaty body was established over 60 years ago. In the global context, some sought to undermine respect for international law and to promote a retreat from international commitments, including in the field of human rights.
Against this backdrop, the importance of the human rights ecosystem and the work of the treaty body system needed to be promoted and protected. In an interconnected world, multilateral cooperation and universal human rights monitoring mechanisms were more important than ever. Committee members had all experienced the challenges that were undermining the accessibility, impact and relevance of the system. Sessions had been cut, making planning unpredictable and further complicated by late confirmations of sessions.
On 11 June 2026, the Office of the High Commissioner launched the Global Alliance for Human Rights, a platform designed to strengthen collective action and reconnect human rights with everyday life, public decision-making, and the future of societies. The Global Alliance integrated gender equality within its “Human Rights in Action” pathway, which sought to tackle discrimination, eliminate gender-based violence, and elevate the voices of survivors. Initiatives under the Global Alliance applied an explicit age, gender and diversity lens to counter global pushbacks against women’s and girls’ rights. The framework aimed to hold governments accountable for implementation failures regarding gender-based violence and systemic discrimination.
Toward strengthening the treaty body system in the long term, the Office of the High Commissioner had shared a working paper to engage all stakeholders in reform ideas, so that together, they could co-create the necessary solutions. The paper focused on convening decentralised and clustered dialogues based on the eight-year cycle; simplifying State party reporting through an integrated and multilingual online report submission platform; and strengthening the election of treaty body members through an online application platform to increase transparency, and to ensure that the experts selected fulfilled the highest criteria of experience, competence, independence and impartiality, in line with the Addis Ababa guidelines. Mr. Ori called on Committee Experts to consider these proposals in terms of feasibility and impact on rights holders and put forward suggestions and constructive comments. For these or any other concrete proposals to work, there needed to be strong commitment from Member States to ensure resources that were adequate, predictable and matched the treaty bodies’ massive task of helping to uphold the normative pillars of the global human rights protection architecture.
Addressing relevant work undertaken by the Human Rights Council, Mr. Ori said the Council’s annual discussion on the integration of a gender perspective throughout its work and that of its mechanisms took place on 29 September 2026, focusing on the theme “From gender stereotypes to structural discrimination: strengthening the Human Rights Council’s response”. Committee Vice-Chair Rhoda Reddock was one of the four panellists who made presentations. The panel discussed the effective implementation of States’ legal obligations to dismantle gender stereotypes, which were embedded in and reproduced by unequal power relations and patriarchal systems. The Committee’s general recommendation 41 on gender stereotypes, which was expected to be adopted later in this session, would provide much needed guidance to States parties in implementing those obligations.
Saying he was aware that the Committee had a heavy programme ahead for the next three weeks, Mr. Ori wished the Committee a successful and productive session. The Committee’s expertise, independence and commitment enabled it to deliver on its important task of ensuring that the rights enshrined in the Convention became a reality for all women and girls worldwide.
Questions and Statements by Committee Experts
NAHLA HAIDAR, Committee Chairperson, said that Mr. Ori was a supporter of the Committee’s work but had not been successful in getting results for it. The Committee had not received sufficient resources or staff support.
The Committee was the most pragmatic treaty body as it was always willing to reform working methods. However, several other treaty bodies were resistant to change. The Committee was always leading efforts to improve the treaty body system, but the system was not moving forward.
One Committee Expert said that women and girls were facing increasing violence both online and offline and regional human rights defence mechanisms were being impacted by funding cuts. The Committee had been forced to cancel two sessions. This situation had led to a staggering backlog of over 330 State reports and more than 1,000 individual victim complaints. Would this situation continue in 2027?
A Committee Expert welcomed the notion of reforming working treaty bodies’ methods and expressed interest in proposed online elections of members. In the current period of egregious attacks on women and girls around the world, it was a real shame that the Committee needed to cut back on its work and sessions. It did not seem that the Committee’s mandate had been given the priority it deserved in the multilateral system.
Responses by the Representative of the Secretary-General
ANDREA ORI, Chief of the Groups in Focus Section, Human Rights Treaties Branch, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Representative of the Secretary-General, said he implored the Committee to “not shoot the messenger”. He said that the Office of the High Commissioner was doing its best in terms of rationalising meeting times and the use of financial and human resources. The financial crisis had also led to cuts in the number of staff in the Office, which impacted its ability to address mandated activities such as assessing individual communications and ensuring equal participation of women and men in decision making.
Mr. Ori welcomed that several treaty bodies were working on recommendations related to artificial intelligence, the latest being the Committee on the Rights of the Child, which was working on a general recommendation on artificial intelligence and child rights. The Office was taking concrete steps to support all treaty bodies in addressing digital challenges such as artificial intelligence, integrating gender into each of its actions.
It was a pleasure to work with the Committee. The Office of the High Commissioner welcomed the Committee’s pragmatism and dynamism in looking for the best solutions to the issues it faced. The online election proposal was a way to respond to complaints from State parties relating to the quality of the work of some treaty bodies. Within the Office’s limited capacity, it would find the best solution in this regard — one that was based on equal participation, transparency and accountability.
The Office would continue working with the Committee on its different areas of work and would continue to consider how to make its work more effective in this challenging world.
Statements by Committee Experts
NAHLA HAIDAR, Committee Chairperson, said that she understood the staffing issues faced by the Secretariat, with some 13,500 staff recently having been terminated. The Committee was not indifferent to this but called on the Secretariat to be more creative in moving forward on important issues. The Committee performed substantial work in the inter-sessional period, and its members were very productive. It would be a pity not to build on that work.
Ms. Haidar said that it had been very difficult for her to keep track of the Committee’s sessions, as the Committee had suffered from the cancellation of two sessions this year and last year. She thanked Committee Experts for maintaining connectivity during the inter-sessional period and Secretariat staff for supporting this work.
She said around the globe, there was a convergence of crises: armed conflicts, autocratic regimes, unprecedented economic inequalities and humanity having reached the tipping point of climate change. The consequences of these crises were disproportionately borne by women and girls. There was also a well-orchestrated backlash against gender equality across regions, the erosion of sexual and reproductive health rights, shrinking civic space, attacks on women human rights defenders, and rising levels of gender-based violence, both offline and online. In the face of these challenges, the Committee was needed more than ever to hold governments accountable for women’s and girls’ equal rights. It needed to continue monitoring the implementation of the Convention and protecting the integrity of it and the other human rights mechanisms in these challenging times.
Since the last session, the number of States parties that had ratified the Convention had remained at 189. Similarly, the number of States parties to the Optional Protocol to the Convention remained at 116. On 29 July 2026, Tajikistan accepted the amendment to the Convention concerning extension of the Committee’s meeting time, bringing the total number of States parties having accepted the amendment to 84. It was surreal to report on this, however, as the Committee had lost meeting time due to session cancellations. A total of 126 States parties to the Convention were currently required to accept the amendment to bring it into force, in accordance with its provisions.
She said she was pleased to inform that since the last session, Algeria, Bolivia, Grenada, Indonesia, Mongolia, South Africa and Trinidad and Tobago had submitted their periodic reports to the Committee. Since making the simplified reporting procedure the default procedure for States parties' reporting to the Committee, 14 States parties had indicated that they wished to opt out and maintain the traditional reporting procedure.
She called on the Committee to address the issues of disaster risk reduction and climate change, humanitarian assistance, and gender and artificial intelligence in future general recommendations.
The Committee then adopted its agenda and programme of work for the session, and Ms. Haidar and Committee Experts discussed the activities they had undertaken since the last session.
NAHLA HAIDAR, Committee Chairperson, said that, as the pre-sessional working group for the ninety-third session was cancelled due to the liquidity crisis, the members who had been nominated to serve on the pre-sessional working group met informally online from 10 to 13 June 2025, respectively to prepare lists of issues for Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Kazakhstan, Paraguay and the Republic of Moldova, as well as lists of issues prior to reporting for Comoros and Poland, which were formally adopted by the Committee at its ninety-first session. Of those, the Committee would consider the reports of Angola, Kazakhstan, Paraguay and the Republic of Moldova at the present session. In addition, it would consider the reports of Cabo Verde, the Cook Islands, Kenya and Togo.
JELENA PIA-COMELLA, Committee Rapporteur on follow-up to concluding observations, briefed the Committee on the status of the follow-up reports received in response to the Committee’s concluding observations. She said that at the end of the Committee’s ninety-second session, follow-up letters outlining the outcomes of assessments of follow-up reports were sent to Bhutan, Costa Rica, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Slovenia, Tunisia, Ukraine and Uruguay. Reminders were sent to Albania, China, France, Iceland, Jamaica, Malawi, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Timor-Leste, Sao Tome and Principe, Spain and Venezuela, as their follow-up reports were scheduled for consideration at the ninety-second session but had not been received.
Eight follow-up reports were assessed in June and July 2026 during the intersessional period. On 3 August 2026, follow-up letters describing the results of the assessments were sent to Albania, France, Iceland, the Philippines, Slovakia, Tajikistan, Spain and Turkmenistan. Also during the intersessional period, reminders were sent to the Central African Republic, Djibouti, Greece, Italy, Niger, Oman and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose follow-up reports were due to be examined at the ninety-third session but were not received.
For the present session, the Committee would consider follow-up reports from Estonia, received one month in advance, and the Republic of Korea, received on time. Reminders regarding the submission of follow-up reports would be sent to Brazil, Malaysia and Rwanda.
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