Exclusive: US seeks to scrap UN efforts to expand women's rights

The Trump administration renewed its campaign to limit the global expansion of human and economic rights for women and girls, opposing United Nations proposals to create a reparations fund for female victims of violence and to regulate artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies that can potentially fuel misinformation and hate speech targeting women and girls, according to internal notes of the talks obtained by Devex.

The U.S. initiative is playing out in negotiations over an outcome document that governments will consider at the Commission on the Status of Women, or CSW, at U.N. headquarters from March 9 to March 19. The document reflects on previous gains in the pursuit of women’s rights and provides recommendations to governments on what they can do to advance the cause of women.  

U.S. diplomats had initially abstained from participation in the early stages of the talks, before reentering the negotiations last week with a laundry list of more than 90 amendments and comments to the draft outcome document. The Trump administration views the process as an unwelcome intrusion of U.S. sovereignty, which maintains that the U.N. has no business imposing its values on member states.