On the Pulse of an Unfinished Justice: A CSW70 Letter on Why America Still Needs the United Nations

There is a particular hush that settles over the United Nations campus on the opening morning of the Commission on the Status of Women. It is not silence, silence would suggest emptiness, and the corridors of CSW are never empty. It is, rather, the hush of arrival. Of women who crossed oceans and continents and the inner thresholds of fear to be present in this house that the world built. It is the hush of inheritance and obligation. 

That hush is not unfamiliar. It was encountered again at CSW70, a convening marked by the gravity of seven decades of unfinished commitments. What follows is offered not as a procedural posting, but as a form of testimony, grounded in decades of women’s development practice within the architecture of equity, and informed by leadership within the UNA-USA Women Affinity Group. It reflects the responsibility to interpret, across distances both geographic and ideological, from Geneva to Geauga County, from the Beijing Platform to the Bluegrass, the enduring and urgent necessity of the United Nations to the United States. 

What was witnessed is shared here with clarity and purpose. 

The Statement Carried 

On the floor of CSW70, I delivered an oral statement, post our written statement on behalf of the United Nations Association of the USA Women’s Group. It named what too few are willing to name: that technology-facilitated violence has become a systematic denial of justice on a planetary scale, and that the legal architecture we have inherited, written for an analog world, cannot bear the weight of the digital harms now multiplying around us. 

The numbers should arrest the conscience of any nation. Between 220,000 and 300,000 individuals, predominantly women, have been trafficked into Southeast Asian “scam compounds” and forced under torture into cyber-criminality. UN Special Rapporteurs declared this a humanitarian crisis in May 2025. Those operations extracted $10 billion from Americans in 2024 alone. The Huione Group laundered $4 billion in trafficking-linked cryptocurrency between 2021 and 2025. FinCEN documented a 488 percent increase in trafficking-related financial reports in a single twelve-month window. 

These are not foreign problems. These are American losses, American victims, American daughters trafficked into compounds whose server’s route through jurisdictions our domestic laws cannot reach. We need the multilateral instrument because the harm is multilateral. We need the treaty body because the criminal enterprise is itself a treaty-class adversary, sophisticated and indifferent to any single nation’s borders. 

The CSW70 Agreed Conclusions, designated E/CN.6/2026/L.2, may be read in their entirety on the UN documents portal. 

Five Essential Commitments and the Treaty Foundations Beneath Them 

My CSW70 Oral Statement issued five Essential Commitments. Each is tethered, by design, to instruments the Agreed Conclusions reaffirm in paragraph two instruments the United States has ratified, signed, or shaped through generations of American jurists and diplomats. These are not aspirational asks invented at a microphone. They are interpretive extensions of binding law into a digital terrain the law has not yet learned to govern. 

Commitment One: Legal Audits of Digital Justice Gaps by CSW71 

Member States must commit to comprehensive legal audits identifying where their domestic frameworks fail to address technology-facilitated harm and report findings before the Commission convenes again. 

This is grounded in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), Article 2, which obligates States Parties to modify or abolish discriminatory laws. It is reinforced by paragraph 8(d) of the Agreed Conclusions calling for comprehensive legislative reviews and evaluation of national legal frameworks and by the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. 

When the United States conducts such an audit federally, and through Cities for CEDAW locally it does not concede sovereignty. It exercises sovereignty in the company of allies. 

Commitment Two: A CEDAW General Recommendation on Technology-Facilitated Violence and Access to Justice, by 2027 

The CEDAW Committee must prioritize, by 2027, a General Recommendation that integrates trafficking, sextortion, forced cyber-criminality, and platform accountability into a single, coherent normative architecture. 

This builds on CEDAW General Recommendation 35 (2017) on gender-based violence and General Recommendation 38 (2020) on trafficking. It finds direct support in paragraph 8(ss), urging States to address gender-based violence amplified by technology including by artificial intelligence and predictive algorithms. It draws further foundation from the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Optional Protocol on the sale of children. 

A new General Recommendation is not a new treaty. It is the authoritative interpretation of existing obligations applied to the technologies that now mediate women’s lives. 

Commitment Three: Cryptocurrency Regulation with Human Rights Due Diligence 

Cryptocurrency regulation must require human rights due diligence, with asset recovery mechanisms prioritizing victim compensation, extending the U.S. Treasury’s existing sanctions regime against trafficking infrastructure into a multilateral standard. 

This is anchored in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, explicitly cited in paragraph 8(tt). It draws further authority from CEDAW Article 2(e), which requires States to eliminate discrimination by any person, organization, or enterprise, and from the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. 

Cryptocurrency was the financial infrastructure of the harm. It must become part of the financial infrastructure of the remedy. 

Commitment Four: Binding Platform Standards 

Platform standards must end immunity for recruitment facilitation, mandate 48-hour content removal of non-consensual intimate imagery, and require gender-disaggregated transparency reporting. 

This finds explicit support across paragraphs 8(rr), 8(ss), and 8(tt) of the Agreed Conclusions, which jointly call for frameworks governing digitally enabled justice platforms with data protection, transparency, and algorithmic accountability. It draws normative authority from the UN Guiding Principles, CEDAW’s prohibition on discrimination by enterprises, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which requires accessible information and communications technology, a requirement systematically violated by platforms that allow algorithmic targeting of disabled women without recourse. 

Platform immunity, designed for an era of bulletin-board operators in college dorms, has become the legal architecture shielding a global infrastructure of recruitment-to-exploitation. The United States, which built that immunity into its statute, must now lead its principled multilateral revision. 

Commitment Five: Palermo Protocol Supplementary Guidance 

The Palermo Protocol on Trafficking in Persons, supplementing the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, requires supplementary guidance addressing online recruitment, cryptocurrency-enabled exploitation, and forced criminality in digital spaces. 

This is reinforced by paragraph 8(q) of the Agreed Conclusions, which calls on States to apply the non-punishment principle to victims and enhance international cooperation in recognition of the increasing links between trafficking and other forms of transnational organized crime. It draws further support from CEDAW General Recommendation 38, the Migrant Workers Convention, and the UN Bangkok Rules, directly relevant where trafficking survivors are themselves prosecuted for the cyber-crimes they were forced under torture to commit. 

The non-punishment principle is the moral spine of any honest trafficking response. It must reach into the digital compounds where it is now most violently denied. 

What the Treaties Already Hold 

Paragraph 2 of the Agreed Conclusions reaffirms the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, CEDAW, the CRC, the ICCPR, the ICESCR, the CRPD, the ICERD, and the Migrant Workers Convention as the comprehensive framework for women’s rights. Read with the Beijing Platform, the ICPD Programme of Action, and the 2030 Agenda, this is the most ambitious legal architecture ever constructed for the protection of women and girls. 

What it does not yet contain and what the convergence of artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and platform-mediated coercion now demands is the digital aperture. The five Essential Commitments name that aperture and propose how it might be opened. 

Nine Sessions: A Chorus of Witnesses 

A statement on the floor is not the whole truth of CSW. The whole truth lives in the side events. I attended nine sessions across CSW70, and they sounded like a chorus. 

In Session One, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Mukwege Foundation, and the SEMA Network gathered survivors from the DRC, Ukraine, and the Rohingya context in Myanmar. They spoke of conflict-related sexual violence as a justice debt the world has not yet paid. Survivor-led advocacy was the phrase. It is also the methodology. 

In Session Two, the Cities for CEDAW movement honored Los Angeles County for its Gender Impact Assessment Program proof that when the U.S. Senate has not ratified CEDAW, American cities and counties can still build it into the bones of local governance. 

In Session Three, UN Women Uganda and the Gender Ministry convened Justice Without Delay, a transformation of GBV justice in a country that has chosen to lead. 

In Session Four, ATscale and UN Women launched Unlocking HER Potential, naming assistive technology as a fundamental enabler of human rights for women and girls with disabilities. The systemic exclusion of disabled women from justice systems is one of the great unspoken scandals of our era. CSW70 spoke it. 

In Session Five, the Permanent Mission of Uganda and FIDA Uganda asked the question I had carried into the building: are we prepared for the escalating digital threats? TFGBV is not Western or African. It is human. 

In Session Six, AUDA-NEPAD convened the African Women’s Empowerment Programme partnership-building at the scale a continent requires. 

In Session Seven, UNFPA, the World Bank, and AARP held space for older women for the truth that old age has a woman’s face, and that our global frameworks have left older women’s voices in the margins. 

In Session Eight, CSW70 Oral Statement Day. 

In Session Nine, UNA-USA Women convened our Kentucky Model side event the story of how a single American state achieved unanimous bipartisan passage of legislation classifying sextortion as a prosecutable offense, enabling homicide prosecutions where coercion led to a young person’s suicide, and creating a legislative template and supports the federal DEFIANCE Act and conversations across UN Member States from Nairobi to New South Wales. 

Hear how those nine sessions cohere. Conflict survivors in the DRC. Local innovation in Los Angeles. Justice transformation in Uganda. Disability inclusion globally. Digital threats in East Africa. Pan-African empowerment. Older women everywhere. TFGBV in the United States. Grassroots success in Kentucky. 

This is the chorus. The melody is access to justice. The harmony is intersectional inclusion. The bass line is the recognition that no single nation, no single agency, no single survivor community can carry this alone. The architecture of justice for women and girls in the twenty-first century must be multilateral, or it will not be built at all. 

The Agreed Conclusions: An Accountability Ledger 

The Commission’s Agreed Conclusions contain commitments numbered through paragraph (xx). Crucially for our generation, paragraphs (qq), (rr), (ss), and (tt) address digitally enabled justice platforms, algorithmic accountability, and gender-based violence amplified by technology, the most explicit treaty-language acknowledgment yet that technology has changed the architecture of harm itself. 

This progress is meaningful. It is necessary. Yet, within any framework of institutional reflection, it must also be stated with precision: this is not yet sufficient. The Conclusions do not yet name cryptocurrency, forced cyber-criminality, or platform immunity. They do not yet require the binding standards the five Essential Commitments demand. They are a foundation. They are not a completed structure. 

This defines the mandate for CSW71. It also delineates the agenda now inherited by the next generation of advocates, policymakers, and practitioners. 

A Closing Word 

To the young women who will read this: the rooms at the United Nations are not closed to you. They are waiting for you. The Oral Statement I delivered was not delivered for me. It was delivered for the daughter who does not yet know the word sextortion and who, if we do our work, will never need to. It was delivered for the woman in Goma whose name will not appear in any treaty annex. It was delivered for the older woman in a village whose contributions have been measured by no economist and protected by no law. 

The treaties were written by ordinary women who refused to leave the room. The Agreed Conclusions of CSW70 were fought for, line by line, by women who did not sleep enough and did not concede easily and did not forget who they were carrying. 

And the United States of America, our complicated and beloved country, becomes more itself more just, more whole, more honest about its founding promises when it stands inside the multilateral architecture rather than outside it. The United Nations does not diminish American sovereignty. It provides the only theatre of operations large enough for American leadership on harms that travel at the speed of light, that cross every border, that respect no flag. 

Stand to your full height. The work is real. The need is urgent. And the room has been built with women like you in mind. 

I am, as I have always been, in service to the work that remains. 

H.E. Lady Tee Thompson 

Legacy Co-Chair, UNA-USA Women’s Affinity Group