Gender-based violence, hatred code and disinformation are being utilized extensively online and offline, to chill oregon termination women’s state of expression, an autarkic UN quality rights adept told the General Assembly connected Monday.
Presenting her report on sex justness and escaped expression, Special Rapporteur connected protecting freedom of sentiment and expression, Irene Khan, said that “women’s voices are suppressed, controlled oregon punished explicitly by laws, policies and discriminatory practices, and implicitly by societal attitudes, taste norms and patriarchal values”.
Gendered censorship
As States proceed to neglect to respect and support women’s adjacent rights, gendered censorship has go truthful pervasive, that women’s equality concerning state of look remains a distant goal, according to the UN expert.
“Sexism and misogyny, which are ascendant factors successful gendered censorship, person been heightened by the emergence of populist, authoritarian and fundamentalist forces astir the world”, she said.
In immoderate countries, young women and sex non-conforming radical are being policed by fundamentalists and, nether the guise of protecting ‘public morals’, censored and criminalized by Governments.
“Such enactment is paternalistic astatine best, misogynistic astatine worst”, underscored Ms. Khan.
No trade-offs
The Special Rapporteur said women journalists, politicians, quality rights defenders and feminist activists were being targeted with vicious, coordinated online attacks and intimidation, aimed astatine driving them disconnected societal media platforms and retired of nationalist life.
Noting that this undermines quality rights, media diverseness and inclusive democracy, she called connected States and societal media companies to – wrong the model of planetary quality rights instrumentality – urgently and decisively marque integer spaces harmless for each women and non-binary people.
“There tin beryllium nary trade-off betwixt women’s close to beryllium escaped from unit and the close to state of sentiment and expression”, argued Ms. Khan.
“States indispensable not usage efforts to code online gender-based violence, hatred code and disinformation arsenic a pretext to restrict state of look beyond what is permitted nether planetary law”.
There tin beryllium nary trade-off betwixt women’s close to beryllium escaped from unit and the close to state of sentiment and look -- UN expert
She urged governments to adjacent the sex integer divide, sex information gaps, and different barriers to women’s close to information, including connected intersexual and reproductive wellness and rights.
“There is not conscionable 1 disagreement but aggregate divides that indispensable beryllium overcome” spelled retired the Special Rapporteur.
Women ‘front and centre’
The COVID-19 pandemic has created an further imperative for stepped-up action.
“If women are to retrieve mislaid ground, if countries are to revive their economies and if governments are to regain nationalist trust, past women’s adjacent close to state of sentiment and look indispensable beryllium beforehand and centre connected nationalist and planetary agendas”, said Ms. Khan.
She added that sex justness requires “not lone an extremity to unlawful interference with women’s state of sentiment and expression” but besides an enabling situation successful which women tin “exercise their bureau and enactment safely, afloat and arsenic successful the political, societal taste and economical life”.
Ms. Khan, who was appointed by the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council connected 17 July 2020, is the archetypal pistillate to clasp the presumption since the constitution of the mandate successful 1993.
She and each Special Rapporteurs are tasked with examining and reporting backmost connected a circumstantial quality rights theme, oregon a state situation.
The positions are honorary, and the experts are neither UN staff, nor paid for their work.
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