The global governance of women’s rights and of sexual and gender-minority rights is undergoing a period of heightened contestation. This follows decades of standard-setting and institution-building around women’s rights, including the nearly universally ratified 1979 landmark treaty Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and thematically related United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) mechanisms, which were adopted by consensus. In 2016, a non-unanimous HRC decision tasked the UN with expanding its mandate to protect sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) rights. While normative advancements have enshrined principles of equality and non-discrimination into the global governance architecture, efforts to translate these principles into effective protection through institutional reform have encountered renewed challenges rooted in cultural relativism and, at times, intense political and ideological opposition. These tensions are most visible when it comes to body politics — that is, the governance of gender identity, sexual orientation, and reproductive rights.
Contestation directly affects the overall stability and legitimacy of the human rights framework.
This report examines the tension between the recognised need to strengthen — or at least protect — global governance mechanisms related to the rights of women and girls by improving state commitment and rule implementation under UN coordination on the one hand, and countering the rise of coalitions opposing the expansion of SHRH- and SOGI-related rights on the other. These actors, including many different states as well as non-state actors, question several human rights developments within the HRC and the treaty bodies (TBs) by invoking particularist and relativist arguments centred on traditional values and theprotection of the family — claims that have in some contexts been advanced “to the detriment of the human rights of women and girls, migrants and LGBTI persons” (Bourke-Martignon 2016, 2). Divisions on women’s and LGBTQI+ rights cut across regional groupings, political orientations, and regime types, with many autocratic governments opposing any further expansion of SOGI protections(Pauselli and Urzúa 2024). Such contestation directly affects not only the potential for institutional reform but also the overall stability and legitimacy of the human rights framework, including the HRC’s capacity to mediate disputes.
Based on the ENSURED conceptual framework laid out in Choi et al. (2024), this report asks: (1) How do the positions of major international actors and patterns of contestation shape institutional reform in the global governance of women’s and LGBTQI+ rights? (2) How do these dynamics affect the democracy, effectiveness, and robustness of this governance? And then, based on this analysis, (3) what are the likely trajectories for future governance in this domain?
This report finds that:
- Institutional reform efforts are indeed profoundly constrained by enduring divergences in state and non-state positions on the governance of sex and gender.
- These divergent positions hinder efforts to improve effectiveness and democracy.
- More importantly, they reveal underlying vulnerabilities in the robustness of the human rights system.
All in all, this analysis demonstrates that reform trajectories remain constrained by enduring divergences among state coalitions, chronic funding shortages within the UN system, and shrinking civic space — factors that collectively undermine the democracy, effectiveness, and robustness of global human rights governance.
Citation Recommendation: Choi, Ha Eun and Andrea Liese. 2025. “The Global Governance of Sex and Gender: Women’s and LGBTQI+ Rights Amid Regress, Reform and Resilience.” ENSURED Research Report, no. 19 (December): 1-40. https://www.ensuredeurope.eu.
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