DispatchesNote: This story is part of a series of coverage from the first week of the 2026 UN Women’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70). Read Day 1.
Day two of the 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70) on March 10 prominently included discussion about how, despite the world making real progress in passing laws that protect women’s rights, the gap between what’s written in statute and what women actually experience remains vast. Across four panels spanning economic rights, gender-based violence, systemic access to justice, and women’s representation in the judiciary, speakers returned again and again to the same conclusion: laws alone are not enough.
Economic Rights: From Paper to Practice
The day opened at the UN headquarters in New York with a session on advancing women’s economic rights, co-organized by the International Development Law Organization (IDLO), the governments of the Netherlands and Sweden, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Landesa, and the Stand for Her Land Campaign.
Dr. Lenita Freidenvall, head of Sweden’s Division for Gender Equality, began by discussing how Sweden has spent decades expanding parental leave, equal access to education, and public services. However, she said, women continue to face structural barriers and discriminatory norms. “Passing laws is only the first step,” she said. “Implementation is what makes rights real.” Even well-designed rules are ineffective, she argued, if enforcement capacity is weak. She discussed that women need to have the economic agency to leave abusive situations and have the personal resources to support oneself and one’s children through major life events.
OECD economist Hyeshin Park reinforced the point with global data. While many countries have introduced legal reforms over the past decade and developing nations are narrowing the gap with OECD countries, roughly 40% of women still live in countries with high levels of legal discrimination. In 38% of countries, women remain legally barred from entering certain professions, often based on outdated assumptions about physical ability. And nearly a third of countries still do not guarantee equal pay for work of equal value.
Park also flagged a growing concern: rising gender tensions among young people aged 15 to 24. Engaging men and boys in the conversation, she said, is essential to prevent a backsliding towards traditional gender roles.
Samah Hadid, global executive director of Musawah, which means “equality” in Arabic, argued that economic rights begin in the family sphere. In many Muslim-majority countries, she said, male guardianship systems require adult women to seek permission from husbands, fathers, or even sons to work or pursue education. When activists challenge these norms on rights grounds, states often respond that the rules are religious and untouchable. Musawah’s approach is to counter with Islamic scholarship that is compatible with gender equality, training jurists, policymakers, and religious scholars to advocate for reform from within.
“It is not enough to reform laws,” Hadid said, “We need to reform minds as well.”
Esther Mwaura-Muiru, Executive Director of the Stand for Her Land Campaign, drove home what this looks like on the ground: in Africa, women produce 72 to 80% of the food, yet in many African countries fewer than 20% of women own land. Her discussion centered on women’s land rights as primary for leading change against social, economic, and environmental injustices. She explained the approach of Stand for Her Land Campaign: bringing support to a women that is centered within the community who then becomes a champion of change within her community.
Justice Without Barriers: Confronting Gender-Based Violence
The second major panel, co-organized by the governments of Iceland, Germany, and Kenya with UN Women, turned to the crisis of gender-based violence and the justice systems meant to address it.
Iceland’s Minister of Justice, Þorbjörg Sigríður Gunnlaugsdóttir, opened with a candid admission. Iceland has topped the World Economic Forum’s gender equality index for 16 consecutive years, yet violence against women remains far too common. She called it a paradox: a country celebrated as a global champion of equality, where interviews and data reveal that rape is widespread and justice remains elusive. Modernizing investigations, she said, requires a “reality-based approach,” asking, for example, what a normal reaction looks like when someone is experiencing fear, rather than relying on outdated assumptions about how victims should behave.
Karin Prien, a federal minister from Germany, shared striking findings from the LesSuBia study, which surveyed 50,000 women. Half of all women reported experiencing partner violence. Among girls aged 16 to 17, 60% reported digital violence in the last five years. And 19 out of 20 cases of intimate partner violence go unreported, driven by fear, dependence, and shame. In response, Germany adopted a Violence Support Services Act in 2025, guaranteeing women and children a right to protection and counseling under the Istanbul Convention.
Kenya’s attorney general, Dorcas Agik Oduor, described a different set of challenges. In Kenya, 34% of women have experienced violence since age 15. Her government has responded by establishing mobile courts in rural areas to educate women about their rights and bring the justice system closer to those who need it most. Agik Oduor explained that no fee or administrative process should seek an individual from seeking redress. She also noted a milestone: Kenya’s chief justice, secretary for defense, attorney general, and controller of budget are all women.
Sigríður Björk Guðjónsdóttir, Iceland’s national police commissioner, offered a sobering metaphor to close this session. Progress on gender-based violence, she said, is like pulling on an elastic band. You have to keep applying pressure because the instant you stop, it snaps back.
Bridging Systemic Gaps: Making Justice Accessible
An afternoon session in the ECOSOC Chamber broadened the lens to systemic barriers in justice systems worldwide.
UN Women executive director Sima Bahous reported that between 2022 and 2024, 325 laws across 83 countries were adopted or repealed with UN Women’s support. She outlined five priorities: making justice systems fair, functional, and properly financed; ensuring trauma-informed services; guaranteeing legal aid wherever women live; funding women’s organizations; and leveraging technology to overcome barriers of distance and caregiving responsibilities.
Zimbabwe’s Minister of Women’s Affairs Monica Mutsvangwa described her country’s progress in establishing one-stop centers that combine medical, legal, and police services, along with mobile legal aid clinics that reach rural communities. “Access to justice goes beyond the courtroom,” she said. She also described that the country has established two commissions, the Zimbabwe Independent Complaints Commission (ZICC) and the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission (ZHRC), both separate, independent constitutional bodies, to prioritize victim’s of gender-based violence.
One of the panel’s most compelling contributions came from Mariam Safi, director of the Organization for Policy Research and Development Studies (DROPS), who shared findings from a survey of women across 33 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Asked what they sought justice for, 45% cited domestic violence and abuse, while 15% cited inheritance and property disputes. Under Taliban rule, informal justice structures, where many women seek to have their complaints heard, are already extremely biased and are now led by Taliban authorities who do not address women’s legal issues. A criminal code passed on January 4, 2026 classifies women as property. Before the fall of the republic, 10 to 15% of Afghan lawyers were women. That has since been dismantled.
Saowalak Thongkuay of the ASEAN Disability Forum highlighted how justice systems remain structurally inaccessible for women with disabilities. A deaf woman cannot report violence if police departments lack sign language interpreters. A woman with a psychosocial disability may be barred from testifying because the law deems her incompetent. Article 13 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities calls for reasonable accommodations, but implementation lags far behind.
Women in the Judiciary: Representation Shapes Justice
A panel, organized by the Working Group on Gender Parity for the International Court of Justice and the ABILA Committee on Gender Justice in International Law, looked at the representation on the bench.
Catherine Amirfar, co-chair of Debevoise’s International Dispute Resolution Group and the Public International Law Group, laid out the numbers. Women account for 43% of judges worldwide but hold only 26% of senior judicial positions. She also raised concerns about AI in the judiciary: a UNESCO and Berkeley study found that roughly 44% of AI systems examined showed gender bias. Models trained on decades of case law, dominated by male jurists, risk perpetuating discrimination, including devaluing testimony from women. A 2024 UNESCO survey found that 44% of judicial operators used AI in their practice, but only 9% reported having guidelines for its use. UNESCO released new guidelines on AI in judicial systems in 2025, and the Council of Europe has adopted the first internationally binding treaty on AI and human rights. Amirfar closed by saying that, “What is needed now is political will with a gendered lens.”
Akila Radhakrishnan pushed back on the assumption that the International Court of Justice is not a venue for gender justice, noting that the first woman on the court was not appointed until 1995. She raised questions on this assumption: Is it because gender issues were never put in front of the court? Is it because gender issues were never taken up by the Court? She pointed to several pending cases that have the potential to be transformational for women-focused jurisprudence, including the genocide case against Myanmar, the Gaza genocide case brought by South Africa, and an Afghanistan case under the CEDAW convention.
Claudia Flores, chair of the UN Working Group on discrimination against women and girls, warned of a creeping erosion of commitments. Some of the hard-won protections in CEDAW, she said, may have been taken for granted and are now being instrumentalized or rolled back.
Real Laws vs. Reality
A resounding theme of day two of CSW70 was that legal frameworks matter, but they are only as strong as the institutions that enforce them, the communities that demand them, and the cultures that sustain them. From Sweden to Afghanistan, from courtrooms to farming communities, the distance between a law on the books and justice in a woman’s life remains the central challenge of gender equality.
