Salwa Bugaighis
Advancing Universal Rights and Justice
Uprooting Fascisms and Fundamentalisms
Across the globe, feminist, women’s rights and gender justice defenders are challenging the agendas of fascist and fundamentalist actors. These oppressive forces target women, persons who are non-conforming in their gender identity, expression and/or sexual orientation, and other oppressed communities.
Discriminatory ideologies are undermining and co-opting our human rights systems and standards, with the aim of making rights the preserve of only certain groups. In the face of this, the Advancing Universal Rights and Justice (AURJ) initiative promotes the universality of rights - the foundational principle that human rights belong to everyone, no matter who they are, without exception.
We create space for feminist, women’s rights and gender justice movements and allies to recognize, strategize and take collective action to counter the influence and impact of anti-rights actors. We also seek to advance women’s rights and feminist frameworks, norms and proposals, and to protect and promote the universality of rights.
Our actions
Through this initiative, we:
- Build knowledge: We support feminist, women’s rights and gender justice movements by disseminating and popularizing knowledge and key messages about anti-rights actors, their strategies, and impact in the international human rights systems through AWID’s leadership role in the collaborative platform, the Observatory on the Universality of Rights (OURs)*.
- Advance feminist agendas: We ally ourselves with partners in international human rights spaces including, the Human Rights Council, the Commission on Population and Development, the Commission on the Status of Women and the UN General Assembly.
- Create and amplify alternatives: We engage with our members to ensure that international commitments, resolutions and norms reflect and are fed back into organizing in other spaces locally, nationally and regionally.
- Mobilize solidarity action: We take action alongside women human rights defenders (WHRDs) including trans and intersex defenders and young feminists, working to challenge fundamentalisms and fascisms and call attention to situations of risk.
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COP30: Homepage Banner
COP30: Reclaim climate action from corporate capture
As world leaders gather in Brazil, feminist movements are advocating, gathering and disrupting the status quo- at COP30 and beyond! We're heading alongside other feminists to Belém, Brazil for COP30, from 10 November – 21 November 2025, where we will continue to denounce false solutions.
40 Years of AWID: The Scrapbook
Gather, Seed, and Disrupt.
In 2022, AWID celebrates 40 years since our founding. We’re using this moment to reflect on our past and learn from the road traveled as we prepare to look forward, and to forge the journey ahead. As we move through cycles of progress and pushback, we know that struggles for women’s rights and gender justice are iterative and non-linear. In collaboration with artist Naadira Patel, we created a scrapbook that highlights a handful of snapshots from AWID’s last four decades of feminist movement support.
We have not done all this on our own. We share this with deep appreciation for the constellation of feminist activists and groups that have made this work possible. In this context of so many converging crises, we embrace the opportunity to celebrate the power and resilience of feminist movements around the world.
Explore our scrapbook below:
You can also explore in full-screen mode.
Download the Scrapbook
Memory as Resistance: A Tribute to WHRDs no longer with us
AWID’s Tribute is an art exhibition honouring feminists, women’s rights and social justice activists from around the world who are no longer with us.
In 2020, we are taking a turn
This year’s tribute tells stories and shares narratives about those who co-created feminist realities, have offered visions of alternatives to systems and actors that oppress us, and have proposed new ways of organising, mobilising, fighting, working, living, and learning.
49 new portraits of feminists and Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) are added to the gallery. While many of those we honour have passed away due to old age or illness, too many have been killed as a result of their work and who they are.
This increasing violence (by states, corporations, organized crime, unknown gunmen...) is not only aimed at individual activists but at our joint work and feminist realities.
The stories of activists we honour keep their legacy alive and carry their inspiration forward into our movements’ future work.
The portraits of the 2020 edition are designed by award winning illustrator and animator, Louisa Bertman.
AWID would like to thank the families and organizations who shared their personal stories and contributed to this memorial. We join them in continuing the remarkable work of these activists and WHRDs and forging efforts to ensure justice is achieved in cases that remain in impunity.
“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” - Mexican Proverb
The Tribute was first launched in 2012
It took shape with a physical exhibit of portraits and biographies of feminists and activists who passed away at AWID’s 12th International Forum, in Turkey. It now lives as an online gallery, updated every year.
To date, 467 feminists and WHRDs are featured.
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رسالة حب إلى الحركات النسوية # 6
عن الحب لحركة
هكذا تبدأ الحركات
أشباحا تطردنا من البيت والعائلة والوطن
فنصل متعبات إلى مساحة (أيضا مكان) وغالبا حالة
وصلت إليها قبلنا نجمة سقطت
ربما نصل أكثر من متعبات
مذعورات
ربما أكثر من مذعورات نصل
غاضبات
من أمور لا تنفك تعيد نفسها
طعنة في القلب (أيضا كسور)
رصاصة في الظهر (أيضا خيانة)
اختفاء قسري
جسد محكوم عليه بزواج أو تشويه أو تعب مزمن
لكننا حين نصل نتجمع ونهمس ونبوح وننوح
هكذا تبدأ حركاتنا، حين نصل إلى الأخريات
فنصبح بذورا
هكذا تبدأ الحركات، حين نزرع بعضا زهورا وأيضا أشواكا وأيضا ثمارا
نحن واحات
لنا كلنا نصنع منها ما نشاء
أغنيات للمعارك
وصفات للشفاء
مخازن لوجوه عشيقاتنا وشكل ابتسامتهن وضحكة انتصاراتهن اليومية
السر لتحويل الصمت الى لغة
تعاليم كل الساحرات
هكذا تكون حركاتنا: لنا كلنا
حين نصل بذورا فنزهر.
سرى أبو غزال
www.badiya.blog
Coming Out at the Highest Point in My Life: The Black Feminisms Forum
Many participants experience the AWID Forums as a unique space of freedom where they are embraced and celebrated as they are. In a world where even the most privileged feminists often find themselves not fully fitting in, for those whose identities are criminalized or otherwise condemned in their everyday contexts this experience of freedom and celebration can be deeply transformative (and restorative). The story of how OluTimehin Kukoyi – a first time participant – experienced the Black Feminist Forum (BFF) and the AWID Forum in Bahia (2016) powerfully illustrates this.
In their own voice: watch the interview with OluTimehin
Sushmita Banerjee
Montha Chukaew y Pranee Boonrat
Eden Marcellana
Saidoo Ali Warsame
Maria do Espírito Santo da Silva
Paula Ettelbrick
Clotilde Marquez Cruz
Josefina Reyes Salazar
Sunila Abeyseke
Snippet “Gender Ideology” Narratives (EN)
“Gender Ideology” Narratives
For decades, feminist scholars and advocates have articulated important concepts related to gender to understand and challenge oppression and discrimination. Those concepts have now become the target of anti-rights actors who claim that oppressive patriarchal gender roles are “common sense”, strategically painting all other ideas, cultural norms, and forms of social life as a dangerous, conspirative ideology.
Read our Brief on “Gender Ideology” Narratives: A Threat To Human Rights
Marinalva Manoel
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NORTH CAUCA, COLOMBIA
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WE DESERVE
MORE!
Sabeen Mahmud
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Occupation’s kitchen campaign:
Women sustain Care | Care Sustains Life | Life Sustains Economy | Who takes care of women? | Not one less1 | Together | Sunday lunch
1Nenhuna a menos literally translates as “not one woman less” or “ni una menos” in Spanish - a famous feminist slogan in Latin America that emerged in Argentina as a response to increasing gender-based violence.