All people in Canada have a human right to safe, legal, affordable, and accessible abortion care. While the federal government and many provincial governments declared abortion an essential service at the start of the pandemic, little has been done by governments to ensure that people in Canada continue to be able to access the SRH services, including abortion care, that they need. In the face of mounting anti-abortion tactics, it is critical that governments prioritize dismantling the barriers to SRH services and abortion care.

In this context, also in Latin America, neoliberal, conservative and anti-gender actors, within and outside the state, were very active in attacking policies and legislation that could advance sexual rights and rights to equality, including gender equality, to create barriers in their implementation or to establish measures of state control and authoritarianism. Although it is important to note that the ferocity of such measures was not as much as in Latin America as in Eastern European countries, Egypt or Russia, it is nevertheless true that these groups found new arguments during the pandemic to add to those they already used. They took advantage of measures adopted by governments to disseminate their perspectives in different ways; from demonstrations to social networks and other virtual media, their speeches included allusions to different conspiracy theories, invocations to restrict rights and distributed false information, all combined to confuse audiences.

Initially, in our quest to delve into the subject matter of wellbeing and wellness, we mistakenly used the two words interchangeably. Now, we only use the term wellbeing. This is because ‘wellbeing’ refers to the more holistic aspect of one’s life rather than just the physical health, which is what ‘wellness’ tends to encompass. It was important for us to recognise and appreciate that people’s welfare is affected by so much more than physical health, so many intangible factors like racism, sexism, patriarchy and capitalism that disproportionately affect LBQ women, activists and human rights defenders mobilising on the continent. Our hope is that these groups of people are holistically well. 

Soon after the World Health Organization announced COVID-19 a pandemic in March 2020, organisations around the world began reporting an increase in gender-based and domestic violence, in what they called a ‘shadow pandemic’. At the same time, another phenomenon started to take shape, that of the ‘citizen-informant’, a term for people who policed other people who were not practicing social distancing. The tendencies for violence and surveillance contained in these two phenomena came together and accentuated each other in a remarkable way in Egypt in April 2020, when TikTok became popular, in what is referred to as the case of women TikTokers in this brief. With the increasing popularity of the TikTok application in Egypt, online bullying multiplied against women and girls, for videotaping their social isolation. By the end of 2020, a 15-second lip sync had become a nightmare. 
The smear campaign against women TikTokers highlights a classist perception of and entitlement to lower-class and lower-middle-class women’s bodies.

The revolution is feminist in its postulates as well and the key demand is the dismissal of the government. However the Women’s Strike, which organised the protests, formulated five key areas for change; these are: full spectrum of access to SRHR, a secular state, implementation of the Istanbul Convention, improvement of the material conditions of women and making Poland an inclusive and non-discriminating country.

At SRI, we believe that it would be foolish to treat COVID-19 as a temporary hiccup in a generally progressivist tale of the inevitable triumph of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) as universally upheld human rights. Experience teaches us to always prepare to have SRHR gains be stalled, coopted, or deprioritized in a crisis, any crisis. The SRHR priority going forward must, therefore, be a refusal to accept “the new normal” – the normal of denial, deprivation, and discrimination – and recognize that the “war” that has been declared on the virus masks another war, one on fundamental and interconnected human rights. The further disempowerment of the impoverished, the unhoused, of gender and sexuality minorities, women in rural areas seeking abortion, adolescents in need of comprehensive sexuality education, sex workers, and women forced into marriage and childbearing – particularly in low-income countries and in low-income communities in wealthy countries – will be written off as the collateral damage of this war. Accepting the war analogy and the discourse of securitization that accompanies it means acceding to the logic of the necessary sacrifice of “foot soldiers” (frontline workers, in this case) and of the weak and most vulnerable among us, and provides a convenient distraction from the impact of the prioritization of military spending and of neoliberal policies of austerity and privatization on health systems and social security nets worldwide that have led us to this crisis. Research from different parts of the world clearly shows that there needs to be a joint, speedy, and concerted effort to catch the backsliding on women's rights, including SRHR, and we can expect that economic recession will be used to justify what the nationalist warcry might fail to.

Unaddressed, historical, structural and systemic discrimination and violence in the world create situations of crisis. Systems of patriarchy, racism and xenophobia and/or neoliberal capitalism created and continue to further and entrench this discrimination and violence increasing situations of crisis across the world. The impacts of any crisis on women and girls has to be addressed considering neoliberal policies that have defunded or privatized public health systems, eroded labour rights and other networks of protection, and promoted precarious forms of labour.[1]  At this moment in time, the multiple and intersecting crises the world has been experiencing for centuries have never been so visible. The economic crisis caused by COVID-19 has exposed the brokenness and inequality of global capitalism. These structural oppressions manifest in different crisis situations while exacerbating the existing forms of discrimination they cause. 

In response to the Special Rapporteur’s call for inputs on housing discrimination and spatial segregation, SRI made a submission addressing the impact of discrimination based on gender and sexuality norms.

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The SRI collaborated on submissions for Eswatini, Hungary, Samoa, Sudan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, and Papua New Guinea for the 39th Universal Periodic Review (UPR) session.

Joint statement by IWRAW Asia Pacific, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, the Sexual Rights Initiative and endorsed by a total of 71 organizations delivered during the General Debate on Item 3 on the human rights obligation to ensure equitable access to the COVID-19 vaccine, particularly to highlight civil society perspectives from the Global South on this topic.

Federation for Women and Family Planning, Poland

Interactive dialogue with the Independent Expert on Foreign Debt