Advocacy & Development

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.”

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When NASA was preparing for the launch of Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983, the engineers asked Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, if 100 tampons were enough for a six-day flight. In November 2025, the US Transportation Department unveiled THOR-05F, the first crash test dummy specifically based on a woman’s body, and not just a scaled-down version of the crash test dummy based on men’s bodies. Several new model cars today, by default, unlock all doors as soon as the car is put into “park’ or when the ignition is turned off, which can be particularly unsafe for women and LGBTQ+ people. This setting has to be manually changed. Closer to home, in various social justice spaces and conferences, there are often panels and conversations taking place that only have men speaking and moderating. Colloquially called “manels,” they are a visible indicator and reminder of how the lack of gender diversity in a conversation is not seen as a problem or even as something unusual. The literal absence of women and gender diverse people across all levels of design and decision-making can be, and is often, dangerous and life-threatening to over half the global population.  

Inversely, in many contexts where non-heteronormative sexuality and gender expression are legally and socially criminalized, LGBTQ+ people and women are often scapegoats for moral social decay and are positioned as the reason for failed governance or even natural disasters. Through digital misinformation and disinformation, and with widespread platform apathy and inaction, narratives around women and gender-diverse people and communities have been manipulated to promote language that results in violence experienced both online and offline by these communities.

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Nine days remained — just nine days before the deadline expired, the bill died, and years of work would have to begin again from scratch. But on June 10, 2026, the Colombian Senate finally voted and gave its approval, making Colombia the first country in Latin America to prohibit female genital mutilation (FGM). Bill 440 of 2025, known as “Niñas sin Ablación” (“Girls Without Ablation”), is a law that was not born in a legislative office, but rather, within the communities that needed it most.

On March 22, 2007, three newborn girls from the Emberá Chamí community died from an infection after being subjected to genital mutilation. It was the first documented case to reach official records, though it is believed it was not the first to occur.

Since then, Colombia has remained the only country in Latin America to officially acknowledge that female genital mutilation is still practiced within its borders. Rather than that acknowledgment being a source of shame, it allowed the state to begin taking action and helped place the eradication of FGM on the global Sustainable Development Goals agenda — but twenty years later, without a law to support those efforts, recognition alone was not enough to protect anyone.

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Maria* was between seven and eight years old when a Brazilian woman came to collect her in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, and take her to Brazil, without any documents or official record of her existence, nor being noticed by any authorities when crossing the border.

“I never went back. From that day I stayed in the house of one [person], [then] in the house of another, then I was going between places. I’ve been all over Brazil. I worked for food, I lived on the street. I was living on the street because that person mistreated me, beat me,” she told a Brazilian court, over 40 years later.

Maria’s told her story during a court hearing. In May 2026, a decision by the First Federal Court of Corumbá, in Mato Grosso do Sul state, Brazil’s Midwest Region, recognized her right to reside in Brazil through family reunification, as she had three Brazilian children, and initiated the procedure for the formal recognition of her stateless status. The court decided that the government and the Federal Police must adopt measures to guarantee their residency regularization, without requiring documents considered practically impossible to obtain because of her position of bureaucratic non-existence.

According to data released by the Federal Public Defender Office (DPU), which represented her, Maria spent much of her life without access to rights considered basic by most people. Without a birth certificate, an identity card, or a passport, she worked informally while raising her children, and always faced obstacles to accessing public services, such as enrolling her children in school or applying for public benefits after the death of her partner.

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How do you use water every day?

You drink, bathe, cook, clean, flush, create, and grow with it. You may get it from a tap, bottle, bucket, river, or well.

Water – unpolluted, adequate, and affordable – is essential to the full enjoyment of our lives. 

It is a human right and it is fundamental, in obvious and not-so-obvious ways. Access to clean water, as well as sanitation, may influence whether a girl can go to school, if a pregnant woman can deliver a healthy baby, or if a family has enough food to eat.

Water and sanitation – or the lack of them – impact the safety, agency, and time of women and girls all over the world.

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A safe city is not only measured by the quality of its lighting, transport, clean streets, or accessible public services. For women and girls across the globe, safety is often measured in smaller, daily decisions:

Which route feels safest during the day and after dark? Can a woman market vendor sell her produce without fear of sexual violence and intimidation? Can girls walk to and from school without being sexually harassed? Can a woman wait for transport, use a public toilet, study, exercise, meet friends, or take part in public life without always having to calculate the risk of violence?

Fear – and experience – of sexual violence affect whether women and girls can move freely through public spaces, earn an income, stay in school, access services in person or online, and join community life.

That is the starting point of UN Women’s Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces for Women and Girls Global initiative, which began in 2011, supported by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation, and further securing support from other donor partners such as the European Union, the Republic of Korea, Canada, Australia, New Zealand the Netherlands, GIZ, and Poland.

Fifteen years since its inception, the initiative now spans comprehensive programming in 75 cities in 36 countries, involving partnerships with local and national governments, women’s rights organizations, community groups, businesses, and other partners to prevent and respond to sexual harassment and other forms of violence against women and girls in public spaces.

The lesson from those cities is clear: There is no single blueprint. A safe city is not created by one campaign, one law, one bus route, or one redesign project. It is built when spaces for women and girls’ participation are prioritized and their voices are heard. It is also built when women’s lived experiences shape all types of policies, when public spaces are planned with their recommendations, and when communities challenge the idea that sexual harassment is inevitable.

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