Initial Considerations

The People of African Descent Stakeholder Group (PAD-SG) is an official civil society participation mechanism within the United Nations system, established in the context of the High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) as a result of decades of political advocacy by the global African diaspora movement. Chaired by women of African ancestry from the Global South, the PAD-SG seeks to confront the historical political invisibility of the African diaspora in multilateral spaces by promoting transnational articulation, the production of strategic knowledge, and coordinated advocacy in intergovernmental processes.

In the context of the 70th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), strengthening access to justice for women and girls of African descent constitutes a central element in addressing structural inequalities produced by systemic racism and patriarchy. This moment also represents a strategic opportunity to expand understanding of the PAD-SG as a participation mechanism and to explore its potential as a concrete tool for building political alliances around racial justice, gender equality, and the transformation of global governance from a Black feminist perspective.

We recognize that the recent landscape of political, health, environmental, and climate crises presents a particular challenge to confronting inequalities at the global, regional, and national levels. This situation is aggravated by the rise of governments that are explicitly racist, discriminatory, and exclusionary; the weakening of democratic institutions; and attacks on multilateralism, further deepened by budget cuts. These contexts also increase the risks faced by women human rights defenders and directly affect their ability to access national and international justice mechanisms. For women and girls of African descent, such crises take on even more severe contours, as they are structurally intertwined with racism and patriarchy, intensifying historical inequalities and limiting their access to rights and opportunities.

At the same time, this year symbolizes important historical milestones for the United Nations system in the struggle against racism and discrimination. We will mark the 25th anniversary of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action and the beginning of the Second International Decade for People of African Descent. Additionally, we are entering the final years for fulfilling the commitments assumed by States within the framework of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals.

For us at the PAD-SG, it is precisely in this context that a political declaration within the framework of the Commission on the Status of Women becomes even more relevant. Our responsibility is not to reduce its language or its ambition, but to strengthen both. The message must be clear, firm, and commensurate with the challenges we face. COP30, held last year in Brazil, demonstrated that more committed language on the anti-racist agenda is possible. The articulation of Black movements and Black women’s movements from Brazil and Latin America, together with Member States, resulted in the recognition of people of African descent in the texts of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), particularly in the Gender Action Plan. This is not merely a symbolic gesture: the explicit presence of people of African descent in these agreements guarantees visibility, guides the allocation of funding, strengthens participation, and contributes to correcting historical gaps in global governance.

We understand that Brazil — where we, women of African descent, represent nearly one third of the total Brazilian population and 54.3% of all women — must adopt a bold stance and join efforts to promote the adoption of anti-racist language. For us, this also means a broader perspective on “justice”: the incorporation of the economic dimension of justice under the premises of reparatory justice, with proposals for measures aimed at repairing human rights violations experienced by women and girls of African descent, stemming from transatlantic slavery and resulting from colonialism and cisheteronormative patriarchal racism. Economic barriers operate as material obstacles to accessing justice, limiting the ability of women of African descent to initiate, sustain, or conclude judicial processes. Without the redistribution of resources and labor and income policies, the justice system remains inaccessible to a large portion of these women.

Furthermore, systemic racism must be recognized as a structural barrier to access to justice and as a driving force behind discriminatory laws and practices based on racial stereotypes reproduced by police institutions, prosecutors’ offices, public defender services, and judicial systems. These mechanisms disproportionately affect women and girls from racialized groups. Addressing this reality requires adequate and sustained funding for justice institutions and services that respond to the specific needs of women and girls of African descent, particularly those living in urban peripheries and traditional communities. This includes culturally appropriate infrastructure, territorially accessible services, and service provision grounded in their knowledge systems, lived experiences, and collective rights, in accordance with international human rights standards.

In light of this, we recognize the importance of normative commitments and language as fundamental symbolic expressions of political ambition and the implementation of racial justice principles within the gender agenda. We also reiterate the expectation that such commitments translate into concrete reparatory practices, effective public policies, and adequate implementation mechanisms.

We reaffirm that the construction of more just and equal societies at the global level requires the incorporation of an explicitly anti-racist and anti-colonial perspective in the multilateral agenda. Normative and symbolic advances are the starting point for structurally confronting the multiple forms of inequality caused by racism and their significant impacts on the lives, peace, and security of  women and girls of African descent in different contexts.

From Reparation to Emancipation: Expanded Perspectives on Justice

Women and girls of African descent remain at the lowest levels of income, labor formalization, and social protection indicators. The concentration of wealth at the top of the economic pyramid confirms the persistence of an exclusionary model. In the Brazilian context, available evidence points to the structural persistence of an economic hierarchy by race and gender, in which women of African descent occupy the lowest income levels while white men occupy the highest, according to national data from 2023. The concentration of wealth at the top is also racialized: in 2023, white people represented 78.6% of the richest 1%, while Black and Brown people were disproportionately concentrated in the poorest half of the population.

In this context, it is necessary to highlight the racial and sexual division of labor that deepens labor inequalities for women of African descent, particularly through the social organization of care. Although precariousness is a structural characteristic of the care sector and domestic work as a whole, its effects fall more heavily on women of African descent. Within this occupational category, in addition to high levels of informality and limited social protection, they have the lowest levels of educational attainment, receive lower wages, and face longer commuting times between home and work, making this activity even more exhausting and unequal.

It is important to emphasize that the colonial logic underpinning domestic work sometimes results in the persistence of conditions analogous to slavery in practice. In this sense, the case of Sônia Maria de Jesus represents a point of convergence between economic inequalities and institutional racism and powerfully exposes the structural limits of the justice system itself in recognizing violations when intersected by race, gender, and disability. Sônia, a woman of African descent with a hearing disability, was removed from the residence of an appellate judge in the state of Santa Catarina, Brazil, where she had remained for more than 40 years in a relationship marked by allegations of conditions analogous to slavery. Despite the gravity of the accusations, the judge’s family contested them and brought a case before the courts requesting recognition of socio-affective parenthood with Sônia. In a subsequent decision, the judiciary authorized her return to the judge’s residence and imposed restrictions on contact with her biological family.

It is also this cycle of precarity that exposes women of African descent to violence in all its dimensions. According to the Atlas of Violence, between 2013 and 2023, 30,980 Black women were victims of homicide, representing 67.1% of all victims with defined causes during that period. In 2023, the homicide rate for women of African descent was 4.3 per 100,000, while the rate for women from other racial groups was 2.5 per 100,000, highlighting the central role of structural racism in lethal gender-based violence.

Lethal violence against women remains largely rooted in the domestic sphere. Data from the 18th Brazilian Yearbook of Public Security indicate that 64.3% of femicides occurred within the home. The home, which should represent protection, has become the most dangerous place for women. Although gender hatred can occur in both domestic and urban contexts, in Brazilian institutional practice the death of a woman tends to be recognized as femicide primarily when it occurs in the domestic environment, revealing limitations in the classification and full recognition of gender-based violence.

In addition to completed femicides, recent years have been marked by increases in other severe forms of violence that often precede them. Beatings and attempted strangulation increased from 3.4% in 2017 to 7.8% in 2025, reaching the highest level ever recorded. In the same trend, physical assaults such as slaps, pushes, and kicks increased from 8.9% in 2017 to 16.9%. Stalking rose from 9.3% in 2017 to 16.1% in 2025.

For us, the increase in these indicators cannot be dissociated from the recent political context marked by the defunding of policies to combat violence against women, the discontinuity and weakening of support services — intensified during and after the pandemic — and the advance of ultraconservative movements that distort debates on gender equality and amplify misogynistic and racist discourse on social media. In short, the persistence of these indicators demonstrates failures in the State’s obligation of due diligence to prevent, investigate, punish, and repair violations.

Within this scenario, we understand that the technological dimension of violence has become central. With regard to technology-facilitated gender- and race-based violence, misogynistic and racist communities that organize online find in social media and artificial intelligence systems a permissive virtual environment for the creation and dissemination of racist, misogynistic, disinformative, and persecutory content targeting vulnerable groups. This context produces a space of impunity in which digital symbolic violence can spill over into the real world, and in which the absence of effective accountability mechanisms for digital platforms constitutes a new structural barrier to access to justice.

Furthermore, access to justice for women and girls of African descent cannot be dissociated from the full guarantee of their sexual and reproductive rights, understood from a broader perspective of reproductive justice. In societies marked by structural inequalities of gender, race, and class, sexuality and reproduction are also regulated by the State. In Brazil, despite recent attempts by the Supreme Federal Court to advance the debate on the decriminalization of voluntary abortion, the issue continues to be frequently instrumentalized by far-right groups under the banner of the “defense of life.” One example is the initiative in the National Congress to classify abortions performed after 22 weeks of pregnancy as the crime of homicide, including in cases of pregnancy resulting from rape. This is compounded by a resolution of the Federal Council of Medicine prohibiting physicians from performing fetal asystole prior to abortion procedures after 22 weeks in cases resulting from rape, thereby imposing additional barriers to legal abortion.

It is important to emphasize that the Brazilian Penal Code does not establish a gestational limit for performing abortion in legally permitted cases. Situations such as this demonstrate how different spheres of the State and health institutions can operate to restrict reproductive rights already established by law. However, the “defense of life” is selective when analyzed in the lens of racial violence, both in relation to public security policies and health policies. In the case of police violence, public evidence in 2024 pointed to the persistence and racial selectivity of police interventions: 82% of the 6,243 deaths resulting from police intervention were people of African descent victims. At the same time, 68.7% of incarcerated people are from African descent, revealing the necropolitical project of death and mass incarceration directed at the population of African descent.

From the perspective of the right to health, women of African descent face the highest rates of maternal morbidity and mortality, in addition to the historical legacy of coercive sterilizations and the psychological and political impact of lethal violence against their children. Thus, the same State that imposes obstacles to the right to decide about pregnancy fails to guarantee survival and a dignified life for these women and their children. Reproductive justice, therefore, is not limited to the individual right to terminate or continue a pregnancy; it also involves the material and collective conditions necessary to decide whether, when, and under what circumstances to exercise motherhood.

In this sense, the concept of justice must encompass economic emancipation and recognize dignified working and income conditions as a driving force for access to human rights lato sensu and reparatory justice for women of African descent. Economic emancipation does not mean precarious entrepreneurship. On the contrary, it requires access to credit, formal employment, training in strategic sectors, redistributive financing, and the transformation of the global financial architecture. In this way, the economic agenda must incorporate affirmative and reparatory strategies in line with commitments assumed by States Parties in the realization of civil, political, social, cultural, environmental, and climate rights.

Beyond the economic dimension, expanded justice is also grounded in the principle of Buen Vivir (Good Living). This conception integrates the individual, the collective, nature, politics, and culture. It values ancestral knowledge, community leadership, and the leadership of women of African descent in rebuilding development models. Finally, such justice must be survivor-centered in order to guide national and multilateral policies. This includes dignity, comprehensive care, reparations, meaningful participation in justice processes, and recognition of the transgenerational character of human rights violations caused by slavery and the African diaspora. This model aligns with international survivor-centered justice approaches currently recognized as best practices within the UN system.

With regard specifically to the justice system — including police institutions, public prosecutors, public defender services, and the judiciary — it is essential to recognize that it reproduces discriminatory practices. Judicial decisions at all levels are marked by racial bias and influence processes from the investigative phase to sentencing, affecting the presumption of innocence, the evaluation of evidence, and sentencing decisions. This is compounded by the uncritical validation of evidence produced in contexts of State violence, such as confessions obtained under coercion or evidence resulting from personal searches based on vague and subjective “suspicious behavior,” which undermines fundamental guarantees. Confronting institutional racism in all spheres of the State is therefore essential to prevent lethal police killings, mass incarceration, humiliating and excessive financial penalties, unjust sentences that suppress fundamental rights, and the denial or obstruction of access to rights.

In summary, Member States must ensure that the Agreed Conclusions of CSW70 incorporate explicit commitments to racial justice, historical reparations, and sustainable funding for organizations led by women of African descent. Systemic racism is not a peripheral issue; rather, it constitutes the organizing structure of global inequalities. Ensuring justice for women of African descent means redefining economic priorities, reforming institutions, guaranteeing historical reparations, and transforming global governance from an anti-racist and feminist perspective. Without such transformation, the principle of “leaving no one behind” will remain an unfulfilled promise.