Women’s Major Group Statement on the High-Level Week, 2023
View from the Top: Summits Reveal Abysmal Progress, Gaping Lack of Ambition
The 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) was a moment of stocktaking and profound reflection on the current state of affairs worldwide, as well as an opportunity to review progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and address critical gaps and challenges as the world grapples with multiple, interlinked crises. Calls for urgent action were loud and clear. However, negotiated outcomes leading up to the SDG Summit, and statements by leaders during High-Level Week were not ambitious enough for a shift away from current business-as-usual approaches. With just 15 per cent of the SDGs on track as of April 2023, the full achievement of Agenda 2030 slips further out of reach.
The Women’s Major Group is particularly alarmed by the unrelenting dilution and rollback of language and persistent inaction on gender equality and human rights. The political declaration adopted at the SDG Summit has only perfunctorily addressed gender equality and human rights, initially envisioned as integral to sustainable development and cutting across the social, economic, and environmental pillars. Several Member States coordinated efforts to strip the outcome document of language on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) and limiting references to women and girls in all their diversity to only a handful throughout the declaration. A similar pattern was observed in the negotiations for the political declaration on universal health coverage, which reverted to agreed language from 2019 instead of adopting more progressive language, which is a reflection of the global rollback on gender equality.
After months of fraught, closed-door negotiations and last-minute objections, leaders finally agreed to a document that acknowledges the lack of progress on the SDGs and includes calls for “bold, ambitious, accelerated, just and transformative actions” but in no way matches the urgent need for deep systemic reforms to our global institutions and systems and the significance of a human-rights centered approach, or addresses the shrinking space for civil society, the alarming rise and support to state and non-state anti-gender and anti-right movements, and continued domination, exploitation, and the exercise of power over, rather than power by historically marginalized and exploited groups and regions. Leaders delivered many generic statements and lackluster commitments throughout high-level week, but ambition, credibility, cooperation, and strategic plans for concrete actions were in short supply – and even absent, since some of the world’s largest carbon emitters were missing from the list of speakers at this year’s Climate Ambition Summit.
The Women’s Major Group reaffirms that the status quo can’t hold. In the lead-up to the Summit of the Future in 2024, we call on Member States, UN entities and other stakeholders to join us in crafting transformative, sustainable, inclusive, human rights-centered solutions accompanied by strong accountability mechanisms, placing gender equality and the empowerment of all women, girls and gender diverse people firmly at the center. Only through this can we have a true ‘course correction’ that upholds the rights of people and the planet.
