Parliament session featuring Phyllis: The 2023 Women’s Assembly is addressed by notable women speakers of the world’s faith and spiritual traditions speaking to the Parliament’s urgent theme: A Call to Conscience: Defending Freedom and Human Rights, and offering women’s diverse, energized, and inspired responses. 

The direct threat of autocracy is disproportionately felt by women and girls in nations around the world. As places like Iran, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Somalia, and the United States have shown, war, nationalism, and autocracy cause immediate and direct harm to the freedoms and human rights of women. In the five years since the last Women’s Assembly, women have lost the right to bodily autonomy in the United States, faced rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war in Ukraine, have been subjected to political persecution and death in Iran, and lost fundamental rights, access to international aid and basic needs like education in Afghanistan and Somalia. 

Where are the women? In countries with authoritarian regimes, they are facing some of the harshest forms of repression and fighting for basic human rights. Where are the women? In democracies around the world, they are advocating for legal protections and pushing back against growing threats to basic rights and liberties. Where are the women? 

We are here!