Elimination of Female Genital Mutilation

A/HRC/RES/44/16View PDF

Who created this mandate?

A Resolution of the Human Rights Council, under agenda item 3Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development, published in 2020.

What other versions does this mandate have?

5 versions · 2016–2025

This is an older version — the most recent is A/HRC/RES/59/16

2025A/HRC/RES/59/16Elimination of female genital mutilationLatestCompare with previous version
2022A/HRC/RES/50/16Elimination of female genital mutilationCompare with previous version
2020A/HRC/RES/44/16Elimination of female genital mutilationCompare with previous version
2018A/HRC/RES/38/6Elimination of female genital mutilationCompare with previous version
2016A/HRC/RES/32/21Elimination of female genital mutilation

Versions are identified automatically by matching titles within the same organ (~97% accuracy on a manual audit).

What subjects does this mandate have?

7 topics

Conferences Crime Prevention Female Genital Mutilation Gender Discrimination Gender-Based Violence Harmful Traditional Practices Women's Rights

What does this mandate say?

36 operative paragraphs

Takes note with appreciation of the report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the expert group meeting on the elimination of female genital mutilation;

Urges States to condemn all harmful practices that affect women and girls, in particular female genital mutilation, including medical acts performed within or outside of medical institutions, and to take all necessary measures to prohibit female genital mutilation and to protect women and girls from this form of violence;

Also urges States to ensure the protection of and provision of support to women and girls subjected to, or at risk of, female genital mutilation, and to address the underlying systemic and structural causes in which the harmful practice is rooted by establishing well-defined, comprehensive, rights-based, gender-responsive and multisectoral prevention and response strategies that include supportive legislation and policy, programme and budgetary measures based on integrated, coordinated and collective approaches combining political commitment, civil society engagement and accountability at the national, local and community levels;

Further urges States to ensure that national action plans and strategies on the prevention and elimination of female genital mutilation are adequately resourced and include projected timelines for goals, and incorporate clear targets and indicators for the effective monitoring, impact assessment and coordination of programmes among all relevant stakeholders and promote their participation, including the participation of affected women and girls, practising communities and non-governmental organizations, in the development, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of such plans and strategies;

Encourages States to put in place national coordination mechanisms to prevent and eliminate female genital mutilation and ensure their sustainability and effectiveness by recognizing, preferably by law, their convening authority and by providing them with adequate financial resources and capacities so that they can oversee the implementation of comprehensive and multisectoral strategies, national plans, policies and programmes, and mobilize relevant actors, including girls, women, parents, legal guardians and families, women’s organizations, health-care workers, youth groups, human rights groups, religious and traditional leaders, community leaders, men and boys and other members of civil society and national stakeholders as appropriate to participate in the design, implementation and monitoring of national efforts to prevent and end female genital mutilation and provide care for women and girls who have undergone female genital mutilation;

Also encourages States to integrate the prevention of and response to female genital mutilation into national development plans and poverty reduction strategies through the active participation of all relevant ministries, parliamentarians, the judiciary, national human rights institutions, civil society organizations and other relevant stakeholders;

Urges States to identify and make available adequate and specifically designated resources to prevent and eliminate female genital mutilation across relevant sectors, including health, nutrition, protection, justice, governance and education, for the effective implementation of related policies, programmes and legislative frameworks;

Also urges States to respect, protect and promote the human rights of all women and girls, and to adopt and expedite the implementation of laws, policies and programmes that protect and enable the enjoyment by them of all human rights and fundamental freedoms, including with regard to sexual and reproductive health;

Calls upon States to take comprehensive, multisectoral and rights-based measures to prevent and eliminate female genital mutilation by:

Addressing the root causes of gender inequality, including gender stereotypes and negative social norms, attitudes and behaviours, the socioeconomic drivers of violence and unequal power relations in which women and girls are viewed as subordinate to men and boys, which perpetuate female genital mutilation, by developing and implementing, inter alia, awareness-raising programmes that provide accurate information about the negative impact of female genital mutilation on women and girls and society at large, including through social media, the Internet and community communication and dissemination tools;

Placing special emphasis on formal and informal education, in particular for young people, including girls, and for parents, legal guardians and families, and religious, traditional and community leaders, about the harmful effects of female genital mutilation and, in particular, encourage men and boys to become agents of change within communities by being more involved in information and awareness-raising campaigns, intergenerational dialogues and peer education and training programmes, with the full, equal, effective and meaningful participation of women and girls who have been subjected to or are at risk of being subjected to the practice;

Facilitating the creation of safe spaces, online and offline, where girls and women can connect with peers, mentors, teachers and community leaders and express themselves and articulate their aspirations and concerns, and where girls, in a manner consistent with their evolving capacities, and women participate meaningfully in decisions affecting their lives;

Developing, supporting and promoting educational programmes on human rights, gender equality, health and life skills that challenge the negative stereotypes and harmful attitudes and practices that sustain female genital mutilation and perpetuate violence and discrimination against women and girls;

Training social workers, teachers, medical personnel, community and religious leaders and relevant professionals, ensuring that they provide competent and supportive services to all women and girls who are at risk of or who have undergone female genital mutilation and encouraging them to report to the appropriate authorities cases in which they believe that women or girls are at risk;

Ensuring that universal health coverage integrates the prevention and treatment of the health risks and health complications associated with female genital mutilation, including through access at the primary health-care level to the mental, sexual, reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health-care services needed for women and girls affected by or at risk of female genital mutilation;

Ensuring a more holistic and coordinated approach to the humanitarian-development nexus by integrating the prevention and response to female genital mutilation into humanitarian preparedness and response, including in the continuum of essential services for gender-based violence;

Stopping the medicalization of female genital mutilation, which implies drawing up and disseminating guidance and legal provisions for medical personnel and traditional birth attendants so that they are able to respond to social pressures in their interaction with local communities to perform medicalized female genital mutilation, and to provide an adequate response to the chronic mental, psychosocial and physical health problems of the millions of women and girls who have undergone female genital mutilation, as these problems hinder progress in the field of health in general and in the protection of human rights, including the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health;

Protecting and supporting women and girls who have been subjected to female genital mutilation and those who are at risk, including by developing interdisciplinary, accessible, sustained and coordinated social, legal and psychological support services and appropriate remedies and ensuring health-care services, including for mental, sexual, reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health;

Conducting specialized awareness-raising and training programmes for health-care providers, including those working with immigrant communities, to address the unique health-care needs of women and girls who have undergone female genital mutilation or other harmful practices, and providing specialized training also for professionals within child welfare services and services focused on the rights of women, and within the education and police and justice sectors, and for politicians and media personnel working with refugee and migrant girls and women;

Urges States to take measures to develop and strengthen accountability systems in the context of comprehensive and multisectoral strategies, policies, plans and budgets to prevent and eliminate female genital mutilation, including by:

Adopting national legislation prohibiting female genital mutilation, in accordance with international human rights law, and ensuring its strict application, while working to harmonize their laws in order to effectively combat the cross-border practice of female genital mutilation, including by strengthening transnational police and judicial cooperation in the exchange of information on victims and perpetrators of female genital mutilation, in accordance with national laws and policies and international human rights law;

Ensuring timely and effective remedies for women and girls at risk of or affected by female genital mutilation, including by informing women and girls about their rights, removing all barriers to access to legal assistance and remedies, providing gender- and age-responsive training for law enforcement officials and other relevant authorities, and ensuring child-friendly justice, the best interests of the child and the right to privacy at all stages of proceedings;

Establishing or strengthening mechanisms to enable safe reporting of cases that are likely to occur or have occurred and to provide referrals to needed services and accurate gender-sensitive and age-appropriate information about female genital mutilation;

Taking, within the general framework of integration policies and in consultation with affected communities, effective and specific targeted measures for refugee and migrant women and girls, their families and their communities in order to protect women and girls everywhere from female genital mutilation, including when the practice occurs outside the country of residence;

Assisting professional associations and trade unions of health service providers in adopting internal disciplinary rules prohibiting their members from engaging in the harmful practice of female genital mutilation;

Ensuring that national strategies and coordination mechanisms to prevent and eliminate female genital mutilation include transparent forms of monitoring, review and oversight of policies, programmes and budgets in order to improve the quality and responsiveness of prevention and response services;

Ensuring that adequate monitoring mechanisms are in place at the national and local levels to track progress in protecting women and children from harmful practices and in realizing their rights;

Developing the capacity of national human rights institutions to investigate human rights violations relating to the practice of female genital mutilation and to monitor progress in preventing and eliminating this harmful practice;

Systematizing the collection of data on female genital mutilation disaggregated by, inter alia, age, geographical location and ethnic and migrant status, encouraging research, particularly at the university level, transparency, accountability and data-sharing by relevant stakeholders and between countries, using the results of research to strengthen public information and awareness-raising activities, and measuring the effectiveness and impact of existing policies and programmes and the progress made in eliminating female genital mutilation;

Promoting, as appropriate, the free, active, informed and meaningful participation of civil society organizations and of women and girls at risk of or affected by female genital mutilation in social accountability mechanisms to monitor policies, programmes, budgets and services designed to prevent and eliminate female genital mutilation, as well as the effective implementation of public declarations of abandonment;

Taking all necessary measures to enable the equal participation of affected girls and of youth-led organizations, including, but not limited to, providing youth-friendly information on participation processes, making available financial resources to girls and youth-led organizations to cover costs related to their participation, and ensuring that their participation is not instrumentalized or deemed irrelevant by dominant entities within participatory processes;

Calls upon States to take a comprehensive, rights-based, gender-responsive and multisectoral approach in the prevention and response to female genital mutilation in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and to pay attention to the specific needs of women and girls, in particular those in vulnerable situations, in terms of, inter alia, accessibility and adequacy of information about the pandemic, the ability to maintain social distance, and access to testing and treatment as well as to essential health-care and other services, such as safe spaces, shelters and other social protection services, while ensuring that the front-line health and social workers assisting them have access to adequate means of protection from the virus;

Calls upon all States to engage in dialogue and to consult with States and other relevant stakeholders, including United Nations bodies, specialized agencies, funds and programmes, to prioritize female genital mutilation as a globally relevant issue and to increase their development cooperation efforts – technical and financial assistance, and South-South and triangular cooperation – for the effective implementation of comprehensive and multisectoral strategies, policies, programmes and action plans to prevent and eliminate female genital mutilation, and encourages States and development cooperation agencies to consider increasing their financial support for the Joint Programme on Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: Accelerating Change of the United Nations Population Fund and the United Nations Children’s Fund, and for all of the other initiatives and activities at the local, regional and international levels;

Urges States to implement the commitments made in the context of the most recent global and regional conferences for the elimination of female genital mutilation and to report on progress in meeting these commitments in the context of existing national, regional and international human rights and sustainable development reporting and review processes;

Decides to convene a high-level panel discussion on the multisectoral prevention of and response, including the global response, to female genital mutilation at its forty-seventh session, inviting States, civil society organizations, United Nations agencies, women and girls and other relevant stakeholders to share good practices in developing comprehensive, gender-responsive, rights-based and multisectoral coordination, planning, financial and monitoring arrangements to prevent and eliminate female genital mutilation on the basis of the human rights principles of accountability, participation, transparency, empowerment and equality and non-discrimination, and ensuring the sustainability of international, regional and national efforts to end female genital mutilation in the context of global pandemics and economic shocks, and requests the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to prepare a summary report on the panel discussion, to be submitted to the Human Rights Council at its fiftieth session;

Also decides to continue its consideration of the question of female genital mutilation in accordance with its programme of work.

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