Advocacy & Lobbying
30 global leaders unveiled their groundbreaking solutions for gender equality today as part of UN Women’s HeForShe movement. Addressing critical policy issues, changing the course of business leadership and the futures of our next generation, these proven practices have the potential to see gender equality achieved within our lifetime.
HeForShe’s IMPACT Champions, comprised of 10 Heads of State, 10 global CEOs and 10 University Presidents, came together to share with the world the key obstacles they have faced on their journeys, as well as the innovative proven practices that can now empower the rest of the world. H.E. Arthur Peter Mutharika, President of Malawi, shared the story of how his country has ended child marriage once and for all, allowing more than 1500 girls to return to education. Bob Moritz, Chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited shared the story of how his organization has gone from 18 per cent female representation in the Global Leadership Team in January 2016 to 47 per cent by December 2016. Paul Boyle, President and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Leicester (U.K.) led a dynamic conversation on how students are generating solutions to address gender-based violence on their campuses.
“The results announced in today’s IMPACT 10x10x10 Parity Report are inspirational. In 2015, I challenged the Champions to ‘think big’ and commit to creative approaches that tackled the greatest barriers. We know that incremental steps do not bring us the benefits that we so urgently need,” said Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women. “As leaders in their fields the Champions hold the key to breaking norms and making game-changing progress for both women and men. The report shares strategies, roadblocks and successes so others can follow suit.”
As part of the 2026 National Assembly Open Week, the House of Representatives convened the National Dialogue on the Electoral College Model for the Special Seats Bill, bringing together legislators, government officials, development partners, civil society organisations, women leaders, and governance experts to examine the revised proposal and build consensus around one of Nigeria’s most significant proposed constitutional reforms on women’s political representation.
Delivering the remarks of House Speaker Rt. Hon. Abbas Tajudeen, Hon. Julius Ihonvbere, Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, described the Special Seats Bill as a defining opportunity for the 10th National Assembly to expand women’s representation. While acknowledging the growing momentum behind the Bill, he stressed that advocacy must extend beyond the National Assembly to the State Houses of Assembly, where constitutional amendments must also secure approval.
In her welcome remarks, Honourable Kafilat Ogbara, Chairperson, House Committee on Women Affairs and Social Development, described the Bill as a practical response to Nigeria’s persistent gender gap in elective office. Chair of the dialogue, Rt. Hon. Patricia Olubunmi Etteh, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, urged stakeholders to build consensus around the reform and ensure that history remembers this generation for choosing inclusion over exclusion.
The year 2025 saw mixed progress on women’s overall representation in parliament, but a key development was the visibility and election of several women from historically disadvantaged groups, including women with disabilities, young women and women from indigenous communities, as shown in the IPU’s recently published Women in parliament in 2025 report.
United Kingdom: Towards a disability-inclusive parliament
In 2025, the Parliament of the United Kingdom embarked on a critical journey – the House of Commons Modernization Committee, under the leadership of its Chair at the time, Lucy Powell, launched an inquiry into how to make Parliament more accessible for those with disabilities.
This was not an isolated occurrence. A year earlier, the chamber had elected the highest number of MPs with disabilities in its history – at least 13 of the elected MPs either have a disability or long-term physical and mental health concerns. Nine of the 13 were women, including Marie Tidball, an MP with a congenital disability.
Since her election, Ms. Tidball has been pushing for the Parliament to become more accessible. This was not only about parliamentarians, but as she highlighted in an interview with a news website, over a fifth of the voting-age population in the country is estimated to have a disability, and it is essential to ensure that Parliament’s composition reflects those numbers. It is also important to ensure that Parliament is inclusive for other people with disabilities who might come through the doors in the future.
This development from the United Kingdom underscores an essential aspect of representative politics – as more and more diverse representatives enter politics and parliaments, they also push these institutions to become more responsive to the needs of their wider communities. In short, parliaments that look like the people are best placed to serve the people.
The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) has published new guidance urging lawmakers to act faster and more decisively against non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), including sexualized deepfakes generated by artificial intelligence (AI), a phenomenon that disproportionately targets women and girls.
Combating non-consensual intimate imagery: A parliamentary action guide warns that generative AI has made it easier, cheaper and faster to create abusive synthetic images from ordinary photos, while existing laws and platform safeguards often fail to keep pace.
The guide cites data from UN Women, which reports a surge in sexualized deepfakes, particularly affecting women and girls, with deepfake videos alone increasing by 550% between 2019 and 2023.
With little evidence that technology companies are doing enough to prevent the creation and circulation of such content – and indeed with commercial incentives pulling in the opposite direction – the guide underlines that parliaments are uniquely positioned to shape the responsible use of AI.
Hong Kong civil society has faced increasing challenges in recent years, including arrests and political prosecution, the disbandment of NGOs, shrinking funding sources, the erosion of the right to protest and assembly, and more, since the enactment of the National Security Law (NSL) in 2020.
LGBTQ+ activism has also been negatively affected. Since 2023, the city’s Pride Parade has been forced to move indoors, as organizers could not find public venues where they could freely celebrate. The venue issue also forced the Gay Games 2023 to scale down and the Pink Dot carnival to move indoors. LGBTQ+ advocacy groups have faced drastic reductions in government-related and charity funding.
To find out how the city’s LGBTQ+ communities are affected by the post-NSL political environment, Global Voices conducted a face-to-face interview with Peregrine (a pseudonym), a nonbinary activist who discussed the challenges they faced, their survival strategies, and their hopes for the future.
GV: How do you account for the clampdown on LGBTQ+ rights in recent years, especially since the enactment of NSL in 2020?
Legal battle: Marriage for all
The Supreme Court ruling will settle constitutional debates among lower district courts over whether the Japanese Civil Code's current exclusion of same-sex marriage violates the Japanese Constitution in early 2027.
Japan’s legal battle for the right to equal marriage began on February 14, 2019, with 13 same-sex couples simultaneously filing lawsuits against the Japanese government in district courts across Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Fukuoka, and Sapporo.
In March 2024, the Sapporo High Court first ruled that the provisions of the Civil Code and the Family Register Act that do not allow same-sex couples to become families are unconstitutional. Four other district high courts hold similar rulings, and the prevailing view is that the current system violates Article 14 (equality under the law), Article 13 (the right to the pursuit of happiness), and Article 24, Section 2 (individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes) of the Constitution of Japan.
However, on November 28, 2025, a Tokyo High Court ruled against its peers, holding that same-sex couples are not included in the constitutional definition of marriage and that any change to that definition should be the responsibility of Japan’s National Diet.
With the support of the LGBT+ activist group Marriage for All Japan, the plaintiffs have brought their case to the Japanese Supreme Court for appeal. As explained by legal scholar Yasuhiko Watanabe, the Tokyo High Court’s ruling would grant “unchecked discretion to the conservative government.”
30 global leaders unveiled their groundbreaking solutions for gender equality today as part of UN Women’s HeForShe movement. Addressing critical policy issues, changing the course of business leadership and the futures of our next generation, these proven practices have the potential to see gender equality achieved within our lifetime.
HeForShe’s IMPACT Champions, comprised of 10 Heads of State, 10 global CEOs and 10 University Presidents, came together to share with the world the key obstacles they have faced on their journeys, as well as the innovative proven practices that can now empower the rest of the world. H.E. Arthur Peter Mutharika, President of Malawi, shared the story of how his country has ended child marriage once and for all, allowing more than 1500 girls to return to education. Bob Moritz, Chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited shared the story of how his organization has gone from 18 per cent female representation in the Global Leadership Team in January 2016 to 47 per cent by December 2016. Paul Boyle, President and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Leicester (U.K.) led a dynamic conversation on how students are generating solutions to address gender-based violence on their campuses.
“The results announced in today’s IMPACT 10x10x10 Parity Report are inspirational. In 2015, I challenged the Champions to ‘think big’ and commit to creative approaches that tackled the greatest barriers. We know that incremental steps do not bring us the benefits that we so urgently need,” said Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women. “As leaders in their fields the Champions hold the key to breaking norms and making game-changing progress for both women and men. The report shares strategies, roadblocks and successes so others can follow suit.”
Introduction
Targeted online violence against women in public life is increasingly technologically sophisticated and damaging, triggering alarming rates of mental health diagnosis, heightened self-censorship, and more frequent escalation to law enforcement. For women human rights defenders and activists, journalists and media workers, and writers and other public communicators, online violence is often deliberate and coordinated, aiming to silence them while undermining their professional credibility and personal reputations. It also serves to fuel the reversal of hard-won rights in a climate of rising authoritarianism, democratic backsliding and networked misogyny. Gender rights rollback is both enabled and exacerbated by technologies which — by design — amplify misogynistic hate speech for profit.
Generative AI apps are the latest manifestation of this form of subjugation. They do not just ‘nudify’ women and girls instantaneously without their consent, they simulate them being sexually assaulted. AI-assisted ‘virtual rape’ is now at the fingertips of perpetrators. This phenomenon deepens and accelerates the harm inflicted on women in public life who are increasingly targeted in online violence campaigns with an escalation in associated offline attacks, abuse and harassment, as our previous research has shown. In this publication — the second installment in the Tipping Point series that examines how online violence is constraining women’s participation in public life in the AI Age — we focus primarily on manifestations of image-based abuse and what happens after exposure to such online violence. How are survivors affected personally and professionally? What coping mechanisms do they deploy? And how do they seek legal redress? Our data is derived from a UN-Women commissioned global survey which was distributed in late 2025 in five languages, in partnership with UNESCO and the International Center for Journalists.
Across the globe, deliberate illiberal strategies that exploit entrenched gender inequality are increasingly being used to weaken democratic institutions from within. The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was not simply a byproduct of chaos at the beginning of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term. Rather, it followed a well-documented authoritarian strategy in which attacks on gender equality are used to consolidate power, narrow civic space, and make democratic governance harder to defend. While the process of dismantling the agency that administered U.S. government foreign assistance has been well documented, significant gaps remain between what insiders witnessed and what the broader public understands. This gap in understanding is not benign. When the public perceives these events as isolated policy shifts rather than coordinated institutional erosion, it diffuses accountability, obscures the impact, reduces resistance, and allows similar tactics to be redeployed without scrutiny.
The administration’s early actions targeting gender equality, women’s empowerment, LGBTQI+ initiatives, and diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility functions operated not as peripheral policy disputes but as frontline tactics that weakened foreign assistance infrastructure, government institutions, and democratic norms. Trump has used this approach since at least 2016. It was mapped out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Drawing on firsthand experience and technical analysis, this report situates these actions within an effective authoritarian pattern of leveraging patriarchal norms and cross-ideological gender bias to justify institutional retrenchment, create administrative compliance, and accelerate structural dismantling. Ultimately, the strategic sidelining of gender equality functions increased institutional vulnerability. Although the Trump administration’s targeting of those functions did not create the vulnerability, it recognized, exposed, and exploited it as part of a wider effort to erode democratic norms. Rebuilding democratic systems and foreign assistance architecture, therefore, will require treating gender equality as a core resilience safeguard rather than a peripheral policy concern. Its strategic targeting is central to the broader authoritarian assault on democracy. Democracy stakeholders must name that pattern, examine the decisions that enabled it, and learn from what unfolded.
Since Tunisia’s 2011 revolution, digital platforms have become central to political participation in the country, enabling female politicians, elections candidates, activists and public figures to mobilise communities and shape public debate.However, this visibility has drastically exposed women in politics to various forms of Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) : Online harassment, sexualised abuse, defamation, threats and coordinated smear campaigns are routinely used to undermine women’s credibility, silence their voices and deter their participation in political life. Beyond the severe harm inflicted on individual women in politics, TFGBV constitutes a structural threat to all women’s political rights, democratic pluralism and freedom of expression. By reinforcing misogynistic norms and normalising sexist intimidation, it erodes hard-won gains of women’s political participation in Tunisia.
What is at stake extends beyond Tunisia. The 2011 Revolution of Dignity which ended the Ben Ali dictatorship marked a historic turning point, igniting the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ and positioned Tunisia as a symbol of democratic possibility in the region and on the African continent. Earlier milestones, from the Personal Status Code of 1956 to progressive reforms including Organic Law No. 58-2017 on the elimination of violence against women and girls (Law 58), have long cast Tunisia as a reference point for women’s rights and legal reform. Tunisia’s trajectory sends signals across Africa and the Middle East about what becomes possible when women’s rights are defended and what collapses when they are politically sacrificed.
This webinar focused on barriers, challenges and strategies pertaining to the issue of gender parity for women in politics. Our guest speaker for the discussion was Dr. Mona Lena Krook.
Applying an intersectional lens the webinar discussion drew on research from Dr. Mona Lena Krook’s book, Elect Women for a Change: The Path to Gender Parity in Politics, Dr. Krook presented a core thesis: the global political community must move beyond aspirational "critical mass" targets (typically 30%) toward a non-negotiable 50/50 parity framework. This shift represents a transition from viewing women’s participation as an elective "add-on" to recognizing it as a fundamental requirement for democratic legitimacy.
Over the past decade Somaliland has seen a worrying convergence of political exclusion for women and active pushback against progressive sexual-offences laws and gender-equity measures. The result is not only weaker legal protection for survivors, but social environments that enable sexual violence and silence victims. This article examines recent examples and reports, connects them to the rollback of protections and low female political representation, and outlines the human-rights and social costs for Somaliland’s women and girls.
This article is released by the Women’s Human Rights, Education & Environment Association (WHEEA), with KOMBOA through the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA) Network. It aims to expose the growing impact of backlash against the women’s rights movement in Somaliland, particularly following the rejection of progressive sexual-offences legislation. By documenting recent cases of sexual violence, political exclusion, and institutional failures, the article highlights how resistance to women’s rights has deepened impunity and vulnerability for women and girls. In addition to analysis, the article provides concrete policy recommendations for lawmakers, religious leaders, civil society, and international partners to strengthen protection, accountability, and women’s political participation in Somaliland.