EU Socialists Want to Control UN Women’s Forum

By | 2026

UNITED NATIONS, March 27 (C-Fam) The Socialists and Democrats (S&D) Group in the European Parliament wants to relocate the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) from New York City to Europe. They are eager to get the annual commission out of the UN headquarters because conservative groups have been so successful in blocking their efforts there.

“As the global right-wing shift directly threatens decades of progress on women’s rights, the European Union must step up and lead. If US policies make it impossible to hold the next session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York, the EU must be ready to host it in Europe,” said the S&D Group.

The S&D Group is the second-largest political group in the European Union, with 137 Members of Parliament and representation on all EU committees.

“We cannot allow the world’s most important forum on women’s rights to become collateral damage of far-right ideology,” said Lina Gálvez, member of the S&D group and chair of the FEMM committee.

The CSW is one of the largest annual UN gatherings, convening hundreds of side events and culminating with an outcome document negotiated by member states. This year, the United States voted against the document, citing its controversial terminology shielding abortion rights and a non-binary understanding of gender.

The “far-right ideology,” “backlash,” “anti-gender,” and “anti-rights” are some of the labels used by the European Union at the UN to refer to conservative groups that reject the framing of abortion as human rights and who oppose gender ideology.

During this year’s CSW, European countries hosted multiple events warning against pro-life and pro-family groups and sharing strategies on how to combat them.

“Authoritarian leaders and far-right movements are attacking sexual and reproductive rights, dismantling gender equality, and starving women’s organizations of funding. This is about power – about pushing women back into silence and dependence,” said Heléne Fritzon, S&D vice-president responsible for Feminist Europe.

CSW has been held at the UN for over 32 years and was started as a result of the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women, one of the global conferences that galvanized pro-life and pro-family groups to get involved in UN negotiations. The call to move CSW from New York is an attempt to silence or otherwise marginalize conservative civil organizations, many of which are underfunded and based in the United States.

Smaller delegations from the Global South, who regularly oppose progressive UN terminology on abortion and gender ideology, often warn against relocations of major forums to Europe as they lack the resources for the same kind of presence and negotiation leverage as they do in New York City.

As part of its reform agenda, the UN is already working to relocate several key agencies away from New York. UN Women, UNICEF, and UNFPA are already set to move to Nairobi, Kenya, by the end of 2026, while UNDP is seeking relocation to Germany.

The UN points to budget constraints and the drive for decentralization as key motivations for relocations, including a desire to replace “top-down” policy approaches with localized solutions. Critics, however, argue that the top-down approach, including the promotion of abortion and gender ideology, might not only persist but worsen, through less transparency and public oversight, as well as the possibility of agencies acting in “silos,” when separated from the UN Headquarters in New York.

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