Remarks by the President of the General Assembly
H.E. Annalena Baerbock
at the Opening of the 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women
Monday, 9 March 2026 10:00 A.M.
General Assembly Hall
[As Delivered]
Madame Chair,
Excellencies,
Distinguished guests,
After 70 sessions of this Commission on the Status of Women,
And 30 years since the Beijing Declaration,
We no longer need to debate why women¡¯s rights matter.
The facts are clear.
The real question is: why are we still not delivering?
It¡¯s not that we don¡¯t know better.
The answer is that inequality is an active choice.
Rollbacks on equal rights are an active choice.
That is why the theme of this year¡¯s CSW¡ªjustice¡ªcould not be more timely.
The struggle for women¡¯s rights is fundamentally a struggle for justice itself.
Justice in principle¡ªwhat our laws say.
Justice in practice and action¡ªhow those laws are implemented.
And justice in power¡ªmeaning who holds it.
Globally, women have only two-thirds of the legal rights afforded to men.
54% of countries lack consent-based legal definitions of rape.
72% allow child ¡ª so de-facto girls¡¯¡ªmarriage.
44% do not mandate equal pay for equal work.
These are not oversights but deliberate choices¡ªchoices that violate the Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and 70 years of commitments made in this Commission.
The most extreme example is in Afghanistan, as we have heard so clearly again this morning.
There, women are not only erased from public life¡ªthey are literally prisoners in their own homes.
So we have to be clear: any normalization with this¡ªwhat some call gender apartheid regime¡ªwould be also an active choice to tolerate the most severe women¡¯s rights violations.
Yet, the opposite is also true¡ªand it lies in our¡ªyour¡ªhands, every day. To take an active choice to speak up and to advance equality.
Over the past decade, more than 40 countries have amended their constitutions to advance women¡¯s rights¡ªfor example closing legal loopholes that allowed child marriage, or defining femicide as a crime punishable by life imprisonment.
Progress is not impossible. It is a political choice. It is active leadership. It is justice in practice.
Which brings me to my second point¡ªlaws on paper are not enough.
Most starkly, despite increasing legislation, still a third of all women worldwide have endured physical or sexual violence.
And technology is accelerating abuse.
An estimated 96 per cent of deepfake videos online are non-consensual sexual content portraying specifically women.
This is again no coincidence¡ªthese systems are set up to silence, humiliate, and control women.
Again, this is about power.
So the decisions we make about regulating these technologies are active political choices: to break this power which is used to silence and humiliate women¡ªor not.
Inaction is a choice¡ªto not protect women.
But action is also a choice.
And I¡¯m proud that here at the United Nations we, you the Member States, took this active choice to protect women by establishing the new scientific panel on AI governance also with equal representation of women.
Because justice in practice will never be delivered without justice in power¡ªmy third point.
Representation shapes priorities, interpretation of law, and outcomes.
If we do not address the fact that three-quarters of parliamentarians worldwide are men,
and 103 countries have never had a female head of state,
then we will hardly deliver on justice in principle or justice in practice.
This reality also applies to this institution:
Madame Chair has been the first female chair of the First Committee.
I am only the fifth female President of the General Assembly.
And currently less than one third of Permanent Representatives are women.
And in 80 years, a woman has never been Secretary-General.
Again, this is an active choice.
An active choice by you, the representatives of every Member State
And the question is not why a woman should be Secretary-General¡ªbut I would say why not after 80 years.
Justice in power also requires confronting those that abuse their power¡ªand the systems that allow it to persist.
And here we cannot ignore the millions of files, now disclosed for the whole world to see ¨C so staying silent would mean complicity.
Because no power and no money in the world makes the systematic abuse of women¡ªa system of sexual slavery and child abuse¡ªjust a pile of files or a lesser crime.
Justice around the world demands the active choice to believe survivors, everywhere around the world, to hold perpetrators accountable every day, and dismantle systems that perpetuate abuse and discrimination.
Because this is what true justice is.
Justice not only in words¡ª
Justice not only on International Women¡¯s Day.
But in principle.
In practice.
And in power.
Every day.
And in this regard I would like to encourage you, especially today, right after the International Women¡¯s Day and the opening of CSW70, to join hands and? take an active choice, an active decision, to support women and girls all around the world with the final outcome and agreed conclusions of this CSW70 because women and girls are watching you, they are watching us.
I thank you.