Accelerating Efforts to Eliminate All Forms of Violence Against Women and Girls Prevention Through the Fulfilment of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

A/HRC/RES/59/20View PDF

Who created this mandate?

A document 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 2025.

Who cites this mandate in the budget?

1 entity

Extracted automatically from each entity’s budget submission.

What subjects does this mandate have?

9 topics

Anti-Discrimination Measures Crime Prevention Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Gender Discrimination Gender Equality Gender-Based Violence Girls Special Rapporteurs Women's Rights

What does this mandate say?

33 operative paragraphs

Expresses outrage at and condemns in the strongest possible terms the persistence and pervasiveness of all forms of violence against women and girls worldwide, including sexual and gender-based violence, as well as technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and reaffirms the responsibility of States to protect all women and girls from violence;

Expresses deep concern that all forms of discrimination and violence against women and girls impair or nullify the full enjoyment by women and girls of their human rights and fundamental freedoms, which hinders their full, equal, effective and meaningful participation, inclusion and leadership in public and private life and is an impediment to achieving gender equality, the empowerment of all women and girls and their full enjoyment of all their human rights;

Stresses the need to address multiple and intersecting, as well as systemic, forms of discrimination and violence, which place women and girls at greater risk of exploitation, violence, abuse, harassment and neglect throughout their life course, and to implement measures, strengthen policies and allocate adequate resources to prevent and eliminate stereotypes based on age, gender, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, xenophobia, religion or belief, physical and mental health, disability and civil, socioeconomic, migration or other status, stigma, negative social norms, and attitudes and behaviours that cause or perpetuate gender-based discrimination and violence against women and girls;

Calls upon States to take immediate and effective action to prevent and eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls, online and offline, by:

Ensuring the full, equal and meaningful participation and inclusion of women and girls in the development, implementation and monitoring of gender- and age-responsive and disability-inclusive national policies, legislation, procedures, action plans, programmes, projects and strategies to prevent and eliminate violence against women and girls, and taking steps to ensure that such participation is consistent and conducted in a safe and accessible environment, online and offline, including through support and capacity-building from civil society actors and women’s and girls’ rights organizations;

Respecting, protecting and fulfilling all economic, social and cultural rights by strengthening legal and policy frameworks, adopting gender- and age-responsive and disability-inclusive policies and programmes and allocating sufficient resources for their implementation, as the fulfilment of economic, social and cultural rights contributes to the prevention of violence against women and girls;

Taking measures to strengthen women’s economic autonomy and ensuring their full, effective, equal and meaningful participation and leadership in decision-making processes by ensuring access to decent work and equal pay for work of equal value, and preventing, detecting, addressing and ending all violence and harassment, including in the world of work, including sexual and gender-based violence and bullying, by adopting and implementing inclusive policies on violence prevention, regulatory and oversight frameworks and reforms, collective agreements, codes of conduct, including appropriate disciplinary measures, independent, effective, confidential and accessible victim- and survivor-centred and trauma-informed processes for victims, survivors, witnesses and whistle-blowers to report all forms of violence, victim- and survivor-centred and trauma-informed referral of cases of violence to healthcare services and police for investigation, creating a culture of accountability and timely and effective remedies, and awareness-raising and capacity-building, in collaboration with employers, unions and workers, including workplace services and flexibility for victims and survivors, and access to the full range of emergency assistance and protection;

Promoting public spaces that are free from violence and discrimination through gender- and age-responsive and disability-inclusive rural and urban planning and infrastructure, including sustainable, safe, accessible and affordable public transportation systems, preventing and eliminating violence and harassment against women on their journey to and from work, and protecting women and girls from being physically threatened or assaulted, including from sexual violence, while collecting household water and fuel, when accessing sanitation facilities or when practising open defecation and urination;

Upholding the right to social security by adopting measures, with an intersectional approach, to recognize, reward and represent paid care workers, and to recognize, reduce and redistribute unpaid care work, currently still disproportionately performed by women and girls, by promoting the equal sharing of responsibilities among family members, and among families, communities and States, and by prioritizing universal access to social protection;

Ensuring the equal rights of all women and girls with regard to the ownership, acquisition, management, administration, enjoyment and disposition of property, reviewing laws and practices and adopting measures to eliminate stereotypes that undermine their rights to own, manage and access land, including in the context of customary and traditional systems, which often govern land management, administration and transfer in rural areas, and ensuring equal access to justice and legal assistance;

Ensuring women’s and girls’ equal right to adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living in all aspects of housing strategies, including through equal access to credit, affordable access to safe and accessible housing, mortgages, home ownership and rental housing, and security of tenure that guarantees legal protection against forced eviction, especially when women and girls face any form of violence or threat of violence, adopting and implementing policies and programmes that enable women to avoid and escape situations of violence and prevent its recurrence, and undertaking legislative and other reforms;

Respecting, protecting and fulfilling the right to education for all women and girls, throughout their life course and at all levels, especially for those who have been left furthest behind, in particular girls living in poverty and in situations of armed conflict and occupation, women and girls with disabilities, Indigenous women and girls, women and girls of African descent and migrant and refugee women and girls, including by reviewing, repealing and eliminating all discriminatory laws, policies and practices that negatively affect the enjoyment of the right to education, and promoting long-term awareness-raising initiatives in education, in communities, in the media and in digital contexts, including by engaging men and boys, through the incorporation of curricula on all women’s and girls’ rights into teacher-training courses, on topics including the root causes of gender-based discrimination and the prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls, including domestic violence;

Ensuring educational opportunities, as well as equal access to inclusive and equitable quality education, including evidence-based comprehensive sexuality education, that targets gender stereotypes and promotes the values of gender equality and non-discrimination, including positive masculinities, and that provides adolescent girls and boys and young women and men, in and out of school, with information on gender equality and women’s and girls’ empowerment, human rights, physical, psychological and pubertal development, power in relationships between women and men, and how to recognize, what to do and where to go if violence, abuse and harassment occur, to enable them to build self-esteem and informed decision-making, tolerance, inclusion and respect, and communication and risk reduction skills, which are all among the most effective ways to prevent sexual and gender-based violence and achieve gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls;

Adopting specific measures to close all digital divides, between and within countries, including the gender digital divide, in particular for girls and young women living in poverty, including in remote and rural areas, and to ensure that particular attention is paid to access, affordability, digital literacy, privacy and safety online and offline, enhancing the use of technology, addressing the underrepresentation of women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math and promoting equal opportunities in the design and implementation of technology and in mainstreaming gender, age and disability perspectives into policy decisions and the frameworks that guide them;

Respecting, protecting and fulfilling the right to sexual and reproductive health, free from discrimination, coercion and violence, and addressing the social and other determinants of health, removing legal and other barriers, developing and enforcing policies, good practices and legal frameworks that respect dignity, integrity and the right to bodily autonomy and guarantee universal access to sexual and reproductive health services that are available, accessible, acceptable and of good quality and evidence-based information and education, including for menstrual health and hygiene, menopause and family planning, and ensuring timely access to maternal health services and emergency obstetric care, including treatment for pregnancy-related morbidities, while being respectful of the principle of confidentiality;

Eliminating legal, administrative, financial and social barriers that hinder women’s and girls’ right to the full enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health and expanding the availability of healthcare services and information, including through telemedicine, as key entry points that provide support, referrals to services and protection to all women and girls at risk of violence, especially sexual violence, and which provide support to adolescents in order to avoid early and unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, through education, information and access to sexual and reproductive health services and information, and ensuring that the training curricula for health workers include comprehensive, mandatory, gender-responsive courses on women’s health and human rights, in particular on gender-based violence;

Paying particular attention to the specific needs of adolescent girls, who are more likely to be subjected to child sexual exploitation and abuse, including grooming and violence online, and child, early and forced marriage, and are at risk of early, frequent, unintended and unwanted pregnancy, which leads to much higher rates of maternal and newborn mortality and morbidity than those of adult women, obstetric fistula and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV and AIDS, and promoting their effective and meaningful participation in decisions that affect them, with a focus on safe and equitable access, particularly in relation to schooling, nutrition programmes, immunization, maternal and newborn care, and child protection and positive parenting programmes;

Promoting the political, social and economic empowerment of Indigenous women and girls, including Indigenous women and girls with disabilities, by, inter alia, ensuring access to public, inclusive, equitable and quality education, including intercultural and multilingual education, addressing the barriers and the multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination that they face, as well as all forms of violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, and promoting their full, equal and meaningful participation in relevant decision-making processes at all levels and in all areas while respecting and protecting their traditional and ancestral knowledge, noting the importance of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples for Indigenous women and girls;

Implementing policies and programmes that include gender, age and disability perspectives, that respect, protect and fulfil the human rights of all family members, and that support families and their members and communities, aimed at, inter alia, achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls and their enjoyment of human rights by addressing poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty and the feminization of poverty, strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective, ensuring that all poverty eradication policies and programmes are responsive to the changing needs and expectations of families in fulfilling their numerous functions and that the rights, capabilities and responsibilities of all family members are respected, and addressing violence against women and girls, including within households and by family members;

Developing and implementing measures that reinforce non-violent actions, attitudes and values, and encouraging men and boys, alongside women and girls, as agents and beneficiaries of gender equality, to take an active part in efforts to prevent, condemn and eliminate all forms of violence and discrimination against women and girls;

Also calls upon States to take immediate and effective action to prevent, respond to and eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls, including sexual and gender-based violence, and to support and protect all victims and survivors by:

Holding perpetrators to account, and eliminating impunity for all forms of violence against women and girls, online and offline;

Ensuring that legislation and policies allow for the timely and effective investigation, prosecution, including ex officio prosecution, sanction and effective redress of violence against women and girls;

Adopting, strengthening and implementing legislation and policies that expressly prohibit violence, provide adequate protection for all women and girls against all forms of violence, end impunity and adequately penalize offences involving all forms of violence and discrimination;

Ensuring equal access to justice and accountability mechanisms for the effective implementation and enforcement of laws and policies aimed at preventing and eliminating all forms of violence and discrimination against women and girls, including by informing women and girls about their rights under relevant laws and policies in accessible formats, including plain language format, including the ability to complain, establishing clear reporting and independent and confidential complaint procedures, such as an inclusive external oversight mechanism, putting in place protection measures that account for risks of retaliation and creating a culture of accountability and timely and effective remedies;

Investigating promptly, effectively and impartially all allegations of violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, independently initiating an investigation wherever there are reasonable grounds to believe that such an act could have been committed, and holding accountable, bringing to justice and punishing those who encourage, instigate, order, tolerate, acquiesce in, consent to or perpetrate such acts;

Providing victims and survivors of violence with effective remedies, including victim- and survivor-centred legal, medical, psychological and confidential counselling services and legal protection that avoid secondary victimization and re-traumatization, including legal remedies in cases of inappropriate arrest to shield or clear their criminal records, providing inclusive support services, information and education in accessible formats using plain language, including on how to prevent, recognize and report instances of exploitation, including trafficking in persons, violence and abuse, encouraging and facilitating victims and survivors to report such crimes, ensuring that they do not face reprisals, and reporting any serious injury to a judicial or other competent authority that is independent of the criminal justice detention administration and mandated to conduct an investigation;

Strengthening or establishing systems to regularly collect, analyse and publish gender statistics and statistical data, disaggregated by sex, age, disability, race and other characteristics relevant to national contexts, on all forms of violence against women and girls, and using these data to inform more effective gender- and age-responsive and disability-inclusive policies and programmes across all sectors to prevent and respond to violence, while respecting human rights, transparency, accountability, privacy and participation;

Ensuring the full, equal and meaningful participation of women and girls, including through civil society and feminist networks and women’s rights organizations, in identifying and determining needs, priorities for funding and services, processes for access and delivery, and crisis response, in recognition of their agency;

Welcomes the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences;

Decides to extend the mandate of Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences, as set out by the Human Rights Council in its resolution 50/7 of 7 July 2022, for a period of three years;

Welcomes the holding of the annual full-day discussion on the human rights of women, and requests the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to prepare a summary report, in accessible formats, including easy-to-read and plain language formats, on the annual discussions held at the present and sixty-second sessions, to present each report to the Council at its sixty-second and sixty-fifth sessions, respectively, and to make the annual discussion on the human rights of women fully accessible to persons with disabilities;

Decides to continue its consideration of the issue of the elimination of all forms of violence against women and girls as a matter of high priority, in conformity with its programme of work, at its sixty-second session.

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