Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and Girls in Care and Support Systems

A/HRC/RES/62/13View PDF

Who adopted this document and its mandates?

A Resolution of the Human Rights Council, under agenda item 3 Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development, published in 2026.

What subjects does this mandate have?

9 subjects

Anti-Discrimination Measures Care Economy Caregivers Gender Discrimination Gender Equality Gender-Based Violence Girls Unpaid Work Women's Rights

What’s in this document?

33 operative paragraphs

Calls upon States:

To ratify or accede to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and to consider ratifying or acceding to the Optional Protocol to the Convention, as a matter of priority;

To limit the extent of any reservations and to formulate them as precisely and narrowly as possible to ensure that no reservations are incompatible with the object and purpose of the Convention, in accordance with the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties;

To implement the Convention through appropriate legislation, regulation, policies and programmes, including in relation to women’s and girls’ access to justice, redress and effective remedies;

To cooperate fully with the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, and other treaty bodies, and to implement its recommendations, as appropriate;

Takes note of the work undertaken by the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls,² including its recommendations to States with regard to their international obligations to support substantive equality by adopting the appropriate measures, including temporary special measures, necessary to prevent, redress and eliminate patriarchal and gender stereotypes that cause or perpetuate discrimination in all spheres of life;

²See A/HRC/59/45 and A/HRC/62/48.

Urges States:

To review, modify or repeal all laws and policies that exclusively or disproportionately target or criminalize the actions or behaviour of women and girls and laws and policies that discriminate against them on the basis of any grounds, including any custom, tradition or misuse of culture or religion, and to create accountability mechanisms to end impunity and prevent, eliminate and remedy the discriminatory application of the law;

To consider reviewing all proposed and existing legislation in accordance with their international human rights obligations, using an intersectional approach that takes into consideration, inter alia, age, race, gender, disability or other status and the historical, social, economic, cultural and political contexts of women’s and girls’ realities;

To promote and implement legislation, regulation, policies and programmes aimed at ensuring substantive gender equality and the social, political and economic empowerment of all women and girls and to prevent, respond to and eliminate all forms of discrimination and sexual and gender-based violence, including domestic violence, and harassment, in all spheres of life, both online and offline, through adequately funded public services and welfare systems, including shelters and access to legal counsel and legal redress mechanisms;

To eliminate all forms of discrimination, in law and in practice, against women and girls in relation to access to land rights, seeds, resources, housing and property, including upon entry into marriage and during marriage and its dissolution;

To remove all discriminatory barriers, including those of a political, legal, social, practical, structural, cultural, economic, institutional and physical nature and those derived from misuse of religion, that prevent the full, equal and meaningful participation, in all fields, of women throughout their life course, as well as of girls, in accordance with their age and maturity, including the participation of women in leadership at all levels of decision-making in the public and private sectors, and to actively promote diversity in leadership and a culture of inclusive and enabling leadership;

To fully realize sexual and reproductive health and rights, including for adolescent girls and young women, free from discrimination, coercion and violence, including by addressing the social and other determinants of health, the removal of legal barriers and the development and enforcement of 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 and evidence-based information and education, including for family planning, and to ensure timely access to maternal health services and emergency obstetric care, including treatment for pregnancy-related morbidities, that are respectful of individual privacy;

To take regulatory measures to combat gender-based discrimination in the provision of services, including healthcare services, by private sector actors, with the aim of ensuring that the services they provide are accessible, adequate and regularly assessed in order to meet the needs and respect the human rights of women and girls, in both urban and rural areas;

To collect, share, promote, support, implement and widely publicize evidence and good practices, including awareness-raising programmes, to prevent and eliminate all forms of discrimination against women and girls, counter gender and other stereotyping and harmful portrayals of women and girls, including those who face multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination, and prevent and eliminate sexual and gender-based violence;

To ensure access to justice and accountability mechanisms and timely and effective remedies for the effective implementation and enforcement of laws aimed at preventing and eliminating all forms of discrimination and gender-based violence, including by adopting a victim- and survivor-centred approach, by informing women and girls about their rights under relevant laws in an accessible way, by improving legal infrastructure and by mainstreaming age-, disability- and gender-responsive training into justice systems to ensure equality before the law and equal protection of women and girls by the law;

Calls upon States to take measures to build and strengthen gender-, disability- and age-responsive, human rights-based and sustainable care and support systems, based on the principles of equality, non-discrimination, universality and shared responsibility, to value and redistribute care and support work and to achieve gender equality, while taking into account available resources, by, inter alia:

Taking appropriate measures to recognize, reduce and redistribute unpaid care and support work and reward paid care and support workers, without compromising care and support for those requiring it, and ensure the representation of paid care and support workers and the participation of unpaid caregivers and those who require care and support in decision-making, while ensuring adequate resourcing for the implementation of such measures as a cross-cutting priority in care and support systems;

Taking all appropriate measures to guarantee access to universal, accessible, adequate, available and comprehensive social protection throughout the lives of women and girls, regardless of their marital status, employment or participation in the formal labour market;

Promoting the equal participation of boys and men in unpaid and paid care and support within households, families and communities and as strategic partners to achieve gender equality;

Recognizing the distinct care and support needs of girls, older women, women and girls with disabilities, women and girls with rare diseases and women and girls in vulnerable situations and ensuring their dignity, autonomy and agency;

Respecting, protecting and fulfilling the right to education for all women and girls, throughout their lives and at all levels, in particular girls living in poverty, promoting long-term awareness-raising initiatives in education, in communities, in the media and in the digital context, engaging men and boys, through the incorporation of curricula on women’s and girls’ rights into teacher training courses on topics including the root causes of gender-based discrimination and the prevention of sexual and gender-based violence, including domestic violence, and the promotion of shared responsibility for unpaid care, support and domestic work within households and families and ensuring universal access to evidence-based comprehensive sexuality education;

Increasing investment in infrastructure, particularly in rural areas, to ensure universal access to affordable, acceptable and quality services for all, including early childhood education and care and health and support services, as well as paid maternity, paternity or parental leave and social protection for all workers, including both informal workers and those in non-standard forms of employment;

Developing, supporting and protecting an enabling environment for the full, equal and meaningful participation of women, as well as of girls, in accordance with their age and maturity, including through women’s and girls’ rights organizations, feminist groups, women and girl human rights defenders and girl- and youth-led organizations, as well as organizations of women caregivers, in the creation, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of and decision-making on care and support laws, policies and systems and promoting gender parity in decision-making bodies;

Developing and implementing legislation and public services that enable the exercise of self-care and recognizing the role that self-care can have in the enjoyment of the human rights to leisure, rest, health, education and adequate housing, as well as full, equal and meaningful participation in public, social and cultural life;

Supporting collective care initiatives and recognizing the important role that they have for women and girls to receive care, provide care and exercise self-care;

Integrating means to prevent and respond to cases of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation against those requiring and providing care by supporting, establishing and strengthening accountability mechanisms and providing access to remedies for human rights violations and abuses in care and support systems;

Establishing or strengthening inter-institutional coordination mechanisms, with dedicated and sustained public budget allocations, for the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of national care and support systems and considering reforming public budgets and taxation to fund care and support systems, taking into consideration proportional and progressive taxation, as appropriate;

Strengthening legal, labour and economic protections for paid care and support workers, including migrant workers, by, inter alia, guaranteeing their rights, including decent wages, equal pay for work of equal value, safe working conditions, social protection and collective bargaining, ensuring the representation and participation of care workers’ organizations in policymaking and promoting gender-responsive employment and macroeconomic policies that create decent jobs, including through the formalization of informal care jobs;

Making efforts to collect and disseminate data on care and support work that are disaggregated by income, sex, age, race, ethnicity, migratory status, civil status, Indigenous origin or identity, disability, geographical location and other relevant characteristics in order to measure the scope and value of, and the need for, paid and unpaid care and support to inform policy and legal design;

Encourages business entities to recognize the value of the skills developed through care and support work in recruitment and employment policies, develop accessible, affordable and quality care and support services for workers, families and communities and contribute to the realization of the human rights of all women and girls by, inter alia, implementing participatory gender and human rights impact assessments and due diligence processes, in line with the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and ensuring that grievance mechanisms and remedies for business-related abuses are accessible, effective and gender-responsive;

Encourages States to proactively seek, nominate and elect more women candidates to fill vacancies in United Nations human rights organs and mechanisms, including in leadership positions, in order to ensure the equal representation of women, and to consider ways to enhance the participation of women in the work of the Human Rights Council, and regrets that, due to the United Nations financial and liquidity crisis, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights was not able to prepare and present to the Council at its sixty-second session a report on the implementation of the recommendations contained in the report of the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee on current levels of representation of women in human rights organs and mechanisms;³

³A/HRC/47/51.

Decides to continue its consideration of the issue of the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women and girls as a matter of high priority, in conformity with its programme of work, at its sixty-eighth session and to remain seized of the matter of addressing care and support from a human rights perspective with relevant stakeholders.

Who adopted this document and its mandates?

What subjects does this mandate have?

What’s in this document?

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