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On July 7, 2026, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted, by consensus, a resolution titled “Promoting, protecting and respecting women’s and girls’ full enjoyment of human rights in humanitarian situations.”
And in its operative text is the term “reproductive violence” named explicitly, for the first time, in a UN negotiated outcome document, as a distinct category of gender-based violence.
The Council defined reproductive violence as intentional acts or omissions that interfere with a person’s reproductive autonomy, or violence directed at someone because of their reproductive capacity. This includes forced pregnancy, forced abortion, enforced sterilisation, forced contraception, and attacks on clinics and facilities that provide reproductive healthcare.
None of the above-mentioned acts is new to international law. Forced pregnancy and enforced sterilisation, for instance, are already prohibited under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. However, this is the first time the broader term that encompasses all these harms is embedded in a globally agreed document.
This recognition matters because, according to UNFPA, without a name, survivors are often left without redress or recourse, struggling even to define the violence they experienced in the first place. A woman coerced into sterilisation in a hospital that never explained what was happening to her is being abused. Denying a girl contraceptive is taking her right to bodily autonomy away. A displaced mother whose access to a maternity ward was deliberately cut off during conflict is experiencing gender based violence. These experiences have rarely been read as connected. But they have now been woven together in the language of international human rights law.
This resolution reflects years of documentation by UN human rights mechanisms, agencies, and civil society groups working to establish reproductive violence as a distinct harm rather than just one out of other categories of abuse.
The timing is not incidental; the resolution was written against the backdrop of specific, ongoing, documented atrocities. The UN Secretary-General’s 2025 review of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action documented elevated levels of reproductive violence in Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and Ukraine.
A UN Commission of Inquiry has separately found that Israel has used sexual, reproductive, and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since October 7, 2023, findings serious enough that they sit within discussions of crimes against humanity.
Dr Diana Pulido of IPPF Humanitarian, reacting to the resolution, called it an important step forward for women and girls in humanitarian crises, and said the task now is turning the recognition into protection, survivor-centred services, and accountability.
Although the resolution specifically applies to humanitarian situations, like conflict, displacement, and crisis settings, it carries no enforcement mechanism of its own. But it stops the treatment of reproductive coercion as a side effect of conflict and establishes it as the gender based violence it truly is.
