Friday | May 9, 2025
GENEVA, CMC – Grenada is being urged to amend its Criminal Code to legalise abortion under all circumstances, which is among the 171 recommendations suggested to the Caribbean island during its 2025 Universal Periodic Review held in Geneva, Switzerland, earlier this week.
Section 234 of the Criminal Code states “whoever intentionally and unlawfully causes abortion, or miscarriage shall be liable to imprisonment for ten years”.
Enid Muthoni, Lori Adelman
Jan 29, 2025
Center for Reproductive Rights
Nicaraguan Susana was 13-years-old when she became pregnant by her grandfather, who had repeatedly raped her. When she found out, Susana said she did not want to continue with the pregnancy, and, with the help of her grandmother, pled five times for the complaint against her aggressor to be accepted. In a country like Nicaragua, which totally bans abortion and has normalized human rights violations, voices like Susana's are not heard. She was forced into motherhood, while her aggressor was never prosecuted. However, this month Susana finally got justice on Jan. 20.
On the same day Donald Trump returned to the White House, the United Nations Human Rights Committee delivered three groundbreaking rulings, holding Ecuador and Nicaragua responsible for grave human rights violations against Susana and two other young survivors of rape who were forced into motherhood. The Committee is clear: everyone, and with greater emphasis on girls, has the right to be free from sexual violence and free to make their own choices. Although the decisions are about the cases of Norma from Ecuador and Lucía and Susana from Nicaragua, they set a new international standard for more than 170 signatory countries of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, including the United States.
Helena Tian | UCL Faculty of Laws, GB/CN
January 20, 2025
Human rights organizations in Latin America issued a joint statement on Friday, expressing deep concerns about the systematic non-compliance of several Latin American states with international human rights, sexual rights, and reproductive rights (SRHR) obligations.
SRHR are fundamental rights protected by a range of international and regional human rights treaties and in national laws and constitutions … [but] legal and socioeconomic barriers in Latin America are currently undermining the ability to exercise self-determination and bodily autonomy free from discrimination, coercion and violence. The statement underlined several overriding issues, including the criminalization of abortion, the lack of access to comprehensive and quality sexual and reproductive health services, institutional gynaecological and obstetric violence, the misuse of conscientious objection, and a lack of implementation of decisions from international and regional human rights institutions.
by Cynthia Soohoo and Jaime M. Gher
November 26, 2024
The United Nations Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls (WGDAWG) this summer issued important new guidance on how governments can comply with their obligations to ensure that individual refusals to provide health care services based on religion or conscience do not create a barrier to reproductive health services, including abortion services. The guidance responds to reports of widespread abuse of “conscience claims” that have undermined abortion access in many regions. As States now turn to the process of implementing the guidance, we offer an explainer on what it requires and why implementation is necessary for States to comply with their international legal obligations.
Given the grave impact that delays or denial of care have on the health and lives of pregnant people, the WGDAWG’s guidance emphasizes that States should only allow conscience claims to refuse abortion services if they can ensure that pregnant people can promptly access these services from another provider.
Continued: https://www.justsecurity.org/105169/un-conscientious-objection-abortion-care/
New recommendations call on the U.S. to fully decriminalize abortion
November 17, 2023
The United States is violating human rights by denying legal access to abortion—and should take immediate action to end the criminalization of abortion at the federal, state and local levels. This is the newly released conclusion of the United Nations Human Rights Committee in response to testimony from Ipas and partners in October.
“This is a reckoning for U.S. policymakers at every level of government,” said Bethany Van Kampen Saravia, Ipas senior legal and policy advisor, who attended the October hearing in Geneva. “The UN Human Rights Committee has appropriately called on the U.S. government to acknowledge the human rights crisis that is taking place within America, as states continue to ban abortion and limit access to sexual and reproductive health care.”
Continued: https://www.ipas.org/news/un-experts-say-u-s-abortion-bans-violate-human-rights/
Oct 26, 2023
By Kaitlyn Kennedy
Geneva, Switzerland - As a slew of abortion bans take effect around the US, advocates are fighting back during the 139th session of the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
They argued that guaranteeing access to abortion falls within the scope of the US' international obligations, as bans can deprive pregnant people of their right to life under Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
The US must learn from other countries where denials of abortion are considered intentional, state-inflicted torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
By Payal Shah and Akila Radhakrishnan
June 9, 2023
On August 24, 2022, Mayron Hollis sought an abortion after receiving news that her pregnancy was endangering her life and its continuation would likely result in uterine rupture and organ damage. Unfortunately, August 24 was also the day that Tennessee’s near-total ban on abortion went into effect. Denied care in her own state and unable to travel to one where she could get the care she needed, Hollis was forced to endure a dangerous pregnancy and birth, where she ultimately suffered severe hemorrhaging and lost her uterus, destroying her ability to give birth to any more children.
There are many terms to describe Mayron Hollis’s experience of being denied an abortion in Tennessee—harrowing, agonizing, unconscionable—but we should also call it what it is: torture and cruelty.
Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/abortion-bans-torture-cruelty/
JP Leskovich | U. Pittsburgh School of Law, US
OCTOBER 21, 2022
Democratic members of Congress Friday asked the State Department to review US obligations regarding abortion rights under international law and remind US states passing restrictive abortion laws of those obligations. In a letter, the group of 69 lawmakers explained:
“Regression on abortion rights in the United States threatens our standing as a global leader on human rights. With the Dobbs ruling, the U.S. joins Nicaragua, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Poland as the only countries who have reduced protections for reproductive rights after previously extending them. The perception of waning U.S. commitment to the protection of women’s rights and to international law more broadly would be especially harmful because the United States has historically championed women’s rights and reproductive rights.”
Continued: https://www.jurist.org/news/2022/10/us-state-department-should-review-abortion-rights-obligations-under-international-law-congressional-democrats-say/
By Chinyere Obasi
July 17, 2022
The most prolific human rights organizations in the United States and abroad value equal and unrestricted access to all maternal care, including abortion, as a human right.
At home, the American Civil Liberties Union has fought for the right to abortion since the 1950s, and Physicians for Human Rights has reaffirmed this stance as recently as May of 2022. Abroad, the Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the World Health Organization have all argued the same: Access to abortion is a human right. The United Nations Human Rights Committee, the U.N.’s official body designed to advocate for and protect such liberties, wrote in a 2018 statement that “States parties must provide safe, legal and effective access to abortion” when the pregnant person is at risk of harm, physical or otherwise, and that those parties should not take steps toward criminalizing abortion, which would inherently promote unsafe abortion.
Continued: https://harvardpolitics.com/poor-decision-making/
By Josh Rogin
June 29, 2022
For decades, the United States has been a world leader in promoting reproductive rights and women’s rights. But now, by overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has struck a severe blow to American credibility in this role. And that, in turn, undermines U.S. international advocacy on these issues, which could result in a cascade of negative consequences around the world.
Last week’s Supreme Court decision on
abortion triggered a deluge of criticism from world leaders, protests at U.S.
embassies abroad and general embarrassment for President Biden, who is
traveling in Europe. Over the longer term, international erosion of faith in
the United States’ commitment to reproductive rights and the effects of changes
in U.S. law could do real harm, according to foreign officials, lawmakers and
leaders of nongovernmental organizations (NGO) I’ve spoken with.
Unblocked: https://wapo.st/3ImcYTL
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