Human Rights Council (HRC)
The Human Rights Council (HRC) is the key intergovernmental body within the United Nations system responsible for the promotion and protection of all human rights around the globe. It holds three regular sessions a year: in March, June and September. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) is the secretariat for the HRC.
The HRC works by:
-
Debating and passing resolutions on global human rights issues and human rights situations in particular countries
-
Examining complaints from victims of human rights violations or activist organizations on behalf of victims of human rights violations
-
Appointing independent experts (known as “Special Procedures”) to review human rights violations in specific countries and examine and further global human rights issues
-
Engaging in discussions with experts and governments on human rights issues
-
Assessing the human rights records of all UN Member States every four and a half years through the Universal Periodic Review
AWID works with feminist, progressive and human rights partners to share key knowledge, convene civil society dialogues and events, and influence negotiations and outcomes of the session.
With our partners, our work will:
◾️ Raise awareness of the findings of the 2017 and 2021 OURs Trends Reports.
◾️Support the work of feminist UN experts in the face of backlash and pressure
◾️Advocate for state accountability
◾️ Work with feminist movements and civil society organizations to advance rights related to gender and sexuality.
Related Content
Publications - Homepage - eng
Publications
Kindle for your feminist fire! Browse AWID’s research on funding, WHRDs, movement building, fundamentalisms, economic justice, feminist monitoring & evaluation and more
Zita Kavungirwa Kayange
Zita était une défenseure des droits des femmes de la région du Grand Kivu.
Elle a été la première directrice exécutive d’UWAKI, une organisation de femmes bien connue. Par son travail avec le Réseau des Femmes pour la Défense des Droits et la Paix (RFDP) et le Caucus des femmes du Sud-Kivu pour la paix, elle a consacré sa vie à rétablir la paix dans l'est de la RDC. Elle a très fermement dénoncé l'utilisation de la violence sexuelle comme arme de guerre.
En 2006, elle s'est présentée comme candidate aux premières élections démocratiques en RDC. Bien qu’elle n’ait pas gagné, elle a continué à défendre les droits des femmes et la communauté du Sud-Kivu se souvient d’elle avec affection.
Snippet - WITM About the survey - PT
Sobre o inquérito
- GLOBAL E DIVERSO: Reflete sobre as realidades de financiamento da organização feminista em escala global e separadas por regiões
- CONTEXTUALIZADO: Dá enfâse às vozes, perspetivas e experiências vividas dos movimentos feministas com toda a sua riqueza, coragem e diversidade, nos seus respetivos contextos
- CRIADO EM COLABORAÇÃO: Desenvolvido e testado em colaboração conjunta com membres da AWID e parceires do movimento
- COMPLEMENTAR: Contribui para os testemunhos existentes e aprofunda os mesmos sobre o estado de financiamento para a organização feminista, de direitos das mulheres e de justiça de género por ativistas, financiadores feministas e aliados
- MULTILINGUE: Disponível em árabe, inglês, francês, português, russo e espanhol.
- CONFIDENCIAL: Damos prioridade à sua privacidade e ao seu anonimato. A AWID jamais divulgará informações sobre uma organização específica ou informações que permitam identificar uma organização através da respetiva localização ou características. A nossa política de privacidade detalhada está disponível aqui.
- ACESSÍVEL: Acessível para pessoas com uma variedade diversificada de habilidades auditivas, de movimento, visuais e cognitivas, sendo que demora aproximadamente 30 minutos a ser realizado.
- REPRODUZÍVEL: Pode ser reproduzido através dos movimentos nos seus respetivos contextos; ferramentas de inquérito e conjuntos de dados estarão disponíveis publicamente para abranger mais inquéritos e advocacia coletiva.
Anti-Rights Tactics, Strategies, and Impacts
Chapter 5
Anti-rights actors adopt a double strategy. As well as launching outright attacks on the multilateral system, anti-rights actors also undermine human rights from within. Anti-rights actors engage with the aim of co-opting processes, entrenching regressive norms, and undermining accountability.

Photo-OP // the first anniversary of the EU signature to the Council of Europe Convention to prevent and combat gender-based violence and domestic violence, the so-called Istanbul Convention
Anti-rights actors’ engagement in international human rights spaces has a principal purpose: to undermine the system and its ability to respect, protect and fulfill human rights for all people, and to hold member states accountable for violations. Some anti-rights tactics operate from outside the UN and include delegitimization and political pressure to defund the UN, or to withdraw from international human rights agreements. In recent years, anti-rights actors have also gained increasing influence inside the UN. Their inside tactics include training of delegates, distortion of human rights frameworks, watering down human rights agreements, infiltrating NGO committees, applying for ECOSOC status under neutral names, infiltrating youth spaces, and lobbying to place anti-rights actors in key positions.
Table of Contents
- Institutionalization of Anti-rights Actors in UN Mechanisms
- Opting-out and Delegitimization
- Lowering HR Standards
- Co-optation - Building a Parallel HR Framework
- Exercise: Yes, they are strong, but so are we!
- Exercise: Holding Governments Accountable
Snippet FEA Audio Story 4 (ES)
Escucha esta historia aquí:
FRMag - Anatomy of a survivor's story
Anatomía de la historia de una sobreviviente
por Maryum Saifee
Cuando se hace una búsqueda en Internet sobre «mutilación genital femenina» o «MGF», junto a la entrada de Wikipedia, aparece una imagen de cuatro dibujos lineales de la anatomía femenina, que ilustran cuatro tipos de violencia. (...)
arte: «Dreams» [Sueños], Neesa Sunar >
Farida Afridi
Bessy Ferrera
Bessy Ferrera a défendu sans relâche les droits humains des personnes trans, travailleuses du sexe et séropositives au Honduras.
Bessy était aussi membre d’Arcoíris, une organisation qui soutient la communauté LGBTI+. Elle était en outre la personne référente de la plateforme Derechos aquí y Ahora (les droits ici et maintenant) au Honduras et plaidait fermement en faveur d’une pleine citoyenneté pour les personnes trans, ainsi que pour l’adoption d’une loi sur l’identité de genre qui permettrait aux personnes trans de changer légalement d’identité de genre.
« Depuis le début de l’année [2019], la communauté trans a été victime d’une série d’attaques, parce qu’elle a défendu et demandé des droits. » Rihanna Ferrera (sœur de Bessy)
Bessy était une travailleuse du sexe qui a été tuée par balle par deux hommes, au début du mois de juillet 2019, alors qu’elle travaillait dans les rues Comayagüela. Ses assaillants ont par la suite été arrêtés.
Bessy fait partie des nombreux·ses activistes des droits LGBTI+ du Honduras, assassiné·e·s en raison de leur identité et de leur travail, parmi qui se trouvent : Cynthia Nicole, Angy Ferreira, Estefania "Nia" Zuniga, Gloria Carolina Hernandez Vasquez, Paola Barraza, Violeta Rivas et Sherly Montoya.
Le cas de Bessy incarne l’injustice, de même qu’un problème plus large de violence systémique à laquelle se confronte la communauté LGBTI+ au Honduras, puisque l’État ne parvient pas à garantir l’offre de droits ni à fournir une protection. Cela est à l’origine d’une culture de l’impunité.
Malgré les risques auxquels sont confronté.e.s les activistes LGBTI+ au Honduras, tous et toutes continuent leur travail pour défier et résister à la violence, ainsi que pour combattre la stigmatisation et la discrimination au quotidien.
« Si je meurs, il faut que ce soit pour quelque chose de bien, pas pour une futilité. Je ne veux pas mourir en fuyant, en étant lâche. Si je meurs, je veux que les gens disent que je suis mort·e en me battant pour ce qui m’appartient » - membre d’Arcoíris
Snippet - WITM FAQ - PT
Perguntas Frequentes
La historia de Crear, Résister, Transform por Coumba Toure
Una experiencia mágica de narración feminista conducida por la feminista panafricana Coumba Toure, quien actuará en la antigua tradición de lxs griots de África Occidental.
Y nos reunimos nuevamente
Juntamos nuestras historias, nuestra fuerza
nuestras canciones
nuestras lágrimas
nuestra ira
nuestros sueños
nuestro éxito
nuestros fracasos
Y lo colocamos todo junto
en un gran cuenco para compartir
durante una luna de pensamientos
Y nos mantenemos en contacto
nos sacudimos las mentes unas a otras
nos acariciamos las almas
mientras nuestras manos siguen atadas
y nuestros besos y abrazos están prohibidos
Sin embargo, nos hacemos más fuertes cada hora
entretejiendo juntas nuestras voces
cruzando las barreras del sonido
mientras hablamos en lenguas
Nuestras voces son cada vez más altas
Sabemos lo que nos diferencia de otras personas
y entre nosotras, de modo que
estamos bordando nuestras bellezas en un mosaico de pensamientos
desde nuestros aprendizajes más profundos, desde nuestros poderes
A veces nos rodea el terror
la confusión, la deshonestidad
pero nos lavamos en el océano de amor
Somos tejedoras de sueños
para vestir nuestro nuevo mundo
hilo por hilo
tan pequeñas como somos
como pequeñas hormigas construyendo nuestro movimiento
comopequeñas gotas construyendo nuestros ríos
Damos pasos hacia adelante y pasos hacia atrás
bailando nuestro camino de vuelta a la cordura
Sostenemos el ritmo de nuestros corazones: sigan
latiendo, por favor, no se detengan
Y aquí estamos, transmisoras de generosidad olvidada
gota tras gota creciendo como el océano
creciendo como el río que fluye de nuestras almas
mostrando nuestra fuerza para ser el agua
que limpiará este mundo
y nos estamos reuniendo nuevamente ¿pueden sentirnos?
Mentiría si dijera que para mí
está bien no verlas, extraño a mi gente
Extraño su contacto y
sus voces sin filtro y sin registro
Extraño nuestros susurros y nuestros alaridos
nuestros gritos de la revolución abortada
Solo queremos parir nuevos mundos
Entonces luchemos para borrar las fronteras entre nosotras
Por favor, no se detengan
Snippet FEA Intro Acknowledgments (FR)
Nous tenons à remercier le collectif Amar.ela de femmes féministes militantes et créatives qui ont rendu cette série possible, et tout particulièrement Natalia Mallo (le poulpe de l'équipe) pour son soutien et son accompagnement dans ce voyage.
Nous exprimons également notre profonde gratitude et notre admiration à tous les groupes et personnes qui ont participé à ce projet, et nous les remercions d'avoir partagé leur temps, leur sagesse, leurs rêves et leurs illusions avec nous. Nous les remercions de faire de ce monde un monde plus juste, féministe et durable.
Nous espérons que leurs histoires inspireront le reste du monde autant qu’elles nous ont inspirés.
FRMag - Esmeralda takes over the Internet
Esmeralda aux contrôles d’Internet : comment les réseaux sociaux aident les femmes roms à gagner en visibilité
par Émilie Herbert-Pontonnier
Vous vous souvenez d’Esmeralda? Cette héroïne « gitane » et exotique née sous la plume de Victor Hugo, géant de la littérature française, et rendue célèbre par les studios Disney et leur Bossu de Notre-Dame. (...)
< illustration : « Si les Marronas le permettent » Nayare Soledad Otorongx Montes Gavilan
Islam Bibi
Navleen Kumar
"She was not a person. She was a power."
- a fellow activist remembering Navleen Kumar
Navleen Kumar was a fervent land rights and social justice activist in India.
With commitment and integrity, she worked for more than a decade to protect and restore the lands of Indigenous people (adivasi) in Thane district, an area taken away by property and land developers using such means as coercion and intimidation. She fought this injustice and crime through legal interventions at different courts, realizing that manipulation of land records was a recurrent feature in most cases of land acquisition. In one of the cases, that of the Wartha (a tribal family), Navleen found out that the family had been cheated with the complicity of government officials.
Through her work, she helped restore the land back to the Wartha family and continued to pursue other cases of adivasi land transfers.
“Her paper on the impact of land alienation on adivasi women and children traces the history and complexities of tribal alienation from the 1970s, when middle class families began to move to the extended suburbs of Mumbai as the real estate value in the city spiralled.
Housing complexes mushroomed in these suburbs, and the illiterate tribals paid the price for this. Prime land near the railway lines fetched a high price and builders swooped down on this belt like vultures, to grab land from tribals and other local residents by illegal means.”
-Jaya Menon, Justice and Peace Commission
During the course of her activism, Navleen received numerous threats and survived several attempts on her life. Despite these, she continued working on what was not only important to her but contributed to changing the lives and realities of many she supported in the struggle for social justice.
Navleen was stabbed to death on 19 June 2002 in her apartment building. Two local gangsters were arrested for her murder.
Может ли одна группа заполнить несколько опросов?
Нет, мы просим только один заполненный опрос от каждой группы.
MANGO
![]() |
Jurema Araújo is a teacher-poet from Rio de Janeiro. She contributed to the magazine Urbana, edited by the poets Brasil Barreto and Samaral (RIP) and to the book Amor e outras revoluções (Love and Other Revolutions) with several other writers. In collaboration with Angélica Ferrarez and Fabiana Pereira, she co-edited O livro negro dos sentidos (The Black Book of Senses), a creative anthology on black women’s sexuality in Brazil. Jurema is 54-years-old; she has a daughter, three dogs, a cat, and many friends. |

Suck it with me?Mango is my favorite fruit. |
Chupa Comigo?A fruta que eu mais gosto é manga! |
Introducing The Black Book of Senses
I’ll admit it: when Angélica and Fabi invited me to curate a collection of erotic texts by black women, I didn’t know what curatorship was. I understood the erotic well, but curatorship... I smiled, feeling shy and flattered. I think I thanked them – at least I hope I did – and thought to myself: what the fuck is it?! This fancy word I’ll have to learn the meaning of while doing it, what is it?
Now at this point, I know what it is to be a curator: it is making love with someone else’s texts, with someone else’s art, with the intention of putting a book together. And that is exactly what I did. I undressed each text of every author of this book with a literary lasciviousness. And I got involved in the words and senses of others. I was penetrated by poems I didn’t write; tales I didn’t even dare to imagine turned me upside down, messing with my feelings, with my libido. And it was a wonderful and unusual orgasm: ethereal, corporeal, sublime, at once intellectual and sensitive.
These texts pulsated like a clit hardened by desire, drenched, dripping joy in every reading. Words that swallowed me with their naughty significance, making me dive deeper into this wet universe.
These black women went to the bottom of their arousals and turned their deepest erotic fantasies into art. These works are impregnated with each writer’s own way of experiencing sexuality: freely, blackly, for ourselves, in our own way, empowered.
I chose to spread the texts throughout different parts of the book, each one organized according to the most delicate, explosive, evident, or implicit content they presented.

To open the door to this “invulved blackessence,” we have our Preliminaries section, with texts that introduce readers to this world of delights. It is a more general, delicate caress to acknowledge the subjects addressed by the texts in the rest of the book.
Then comes the heat of Touch, addressing what the skin can feel. That energy which burns or freezes our bodies, makes our hormones explode and starts to awaken the other senses. And although there are many of us who are voyeurs, the contact of skin with a wet and warm mouth is exciting, like wandering through the softness of whomever is with you. We are seduced by the firm or gentle touch that gives us goosebumps and that lovely discomfort that runs from the neck down to the back and only stops the next day. And the warmth of the lips, the mouth, the wet tongue on the skin – oh, the tongue in the ear, hmmm – or skin on skin, clothes moving over the body, almost like an extension of the other’s hand. If there is no urgency, that wildest arousal of the pressure of a tight grab, a bit of pain – or a lot, who knows?
The Sound – or melody? – section shows us that attraction also happens through hearing: the voice, the whispers, the music that enables the connection between the bodies and can become the theme of desire. For some of us, someone with a beautiful voice would only need their vocal cords, because that harsh or heavy or melodious sound would be auditory sex. Their loud swearing or sweet words whispered in the ear would be enough to give us hair-raising shivers from neck to coccyx.

In Flavor, we know the tongue does a good job tasting the most hidden places and wandering through the body to delight itself. Sometimes this organ is used, boldly, to taste the other’s nectar. The idea of someone sharing their strawberry or a delicious, juicy mango through bites and licks – or licks and bites – melts us. But nothing is more delicious than tasting the caves and hills of the person you are with. Stick your tongue deep inside to taste a piece of fruit... or spend hours tasting the head of a cock in your mouth, or suck on a delicious breast to taste the nipples. This is all about memorizing someone by their Flavor.
There are texts in which the nose is what triggers desire. The Smell, my dear readers, can awaken us to the delights of desire. Sometimes we meet a person who smells so good, we want to swallow them right through our nose. When you run through the other person’s body with your nose, starting with the neck – wow, that delightfully uncomfortable shiver that runs down the spine and undresses the soul! The shameless nose then moves to the back of the neck and captures the scent of the other in such a way that in the absence of that person, smelling their same scent evokes, or conversely, invades in us olfactory memories that bring the arousing smell of that person back.
We then get to Look – for me, the betrayer of senses – in which we perceive desire from a point of “view.” It is through sight that the texts present desire and arousal, through which the other senses are brought about. Sometimes a smile is all it takes to drive us crazy. The exchange of glances? That look that says “I want you now.” That look of possession that comes to an end when you stop fucking, or not. That one is very particular; it draws the other who won’t be able to look away for long. Or the sidelong glance – when one looks away when the other turns their head, like a cat-and-mouse game? Once we are caught red-handed, there’s nothing else to do besides breaking into a wide smile.
Finally, the explosion. Wandering through All senses, the texts mix feelings that seem like an alert, so there is the greatest pleasure, that orgasm.
Of course, there is nothing explicitly separating these poems and tales. Some are subtle. Arousal engages all our senses and, most importantly, our heads. That’s where it happens, and it connects our whole body. I organized the poems according to how they came to me in each reading. Feel free to disagree! But to me, there is a sense through which desire goes and then explodes. Realizing which one it is, is delightful.
Being able to turn arousal into art means freeing ourselves from all the prejudice, prisons, and stigma this white-centric society has trapped us in.

Every time a black writer transforms the erotic into art, she breaks these harmful racist chains that cripple her body, repress her sexuality, and turn us into the object of another’s greed. Writing erotic poetry is taking back the power over her own body and roaming fearlessly through the delights of desire for herself, for others, for life.
The literary erotic is who we are when turned into art. Here we show the best of us, our views of love drenched by pleasure, seasoned by the erogenous, spread through our bodies, and translated by our artistic consciousness. We are multiple and we share this multiplicity of sensations in words dripping with arousal. Yes, even our words drip with our sexual desire, drenching our verses, turning our sexual urges into paragraphs. To come, for us, is a breakthrough.
It is necessary to make our minds, bodies, and sexuality black, to reestablish our pleasure, and take back our orgasms. Only then will we be free. This whole process is a breakthrough, and it happens painfully. But there is happiness in finding ourselves to be very different from where we had been placed.
I feel like I am yours, I am ours. Taste, delight yourselves, feast on these beautiful words with us.
This text is adapted from the introductions to “O Livro Negro Dos Sentidos” [The Black Book of Senses], an erotic collection of poems by 23 black female writers.

Explore Transnational Embodiments
This journal edition in partnership with Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research, will explore feminist solutions, proposals and realities for transforming our current world, our bodies and our sexualities.

التجسيدات العابرة للحدود
نصدر النسخة هذه من المجلة بالشراكة مع «كحل: مجلة لأبحاث الجسد والجندر»، وسنستكشف عبرها الحلول والاقتراحات وأنواع الواقع النسوية لتغيير عالمنا الحالي وكذلك أجسادنا وجنسانياتنا.

