Over the past decade, feminist movements and women human rights defenders (WHRDs) across the Global South have demonstrated extraordinary resilience in the face of authoritarian repression and sustained funding cuts. They have experienced escalating surveillance, gendered disinformation campaigns, and coordinated efforts that delegitimise their work through online harassment and smear attacks. The weaponising of sexuality to discredit WHRDs, combined with the growing use of artificial intelligence technologies to generate deepfakes and manipulated images, has added a new layer of violence that is difficult to contest and almost impossible to contain once spread online. These forms of digital repression don’t happen in a vacuum; they intersect with political censorship, mass internet shutdowns, and legal crackdowns that force activists into self-censorship in order to preserve their safety. Across regions, targeted attacks on WHRDs have had the cumulative effect of silencing and erasing their voices, whether through state-imposed restrictions, or shadow banning by technology companies that happen very frequently as a strategy of suppression of voices, or the self-censorship that becomes a survival strategy.
Evidence from multiple studies highlights this alarming trend. For example, in Pakistan, a 2023 study by Media Matters for Democracy found that eight out of ten women journalists were self-censoring due to the fear of digital and physical violence. Similarly, a 2024 Citizen Lab study with 85 WHRDs living in exile documented how many were forced to constantly calculate risks, avoiding large gatherings for fear of surveillance, shifting their advocacy into private research and behind-the-scenes organising, or limiting themselves to trusted circles. The pattern is documented across Africa in APC’s 2020 Feminist Internet Research Network (FIRN) study Alternate Realities, Alternate Internets. The study, with more than 3,000 respondents, found that 14.5% of women deleted or deactivated their accounts and 12.2% stopped using a digital platform altogether after experiencing online violence. As the report concluded, “This is not only another form of self-censorship and restrictions on the freedom of expression of women, but also the complete erasure of their digital identities and presence."
In recent years, WHRDs' determination to fight for rights has persisted under unprecedented physical and online threats that are escalating in both volume and severity, while the international protection framework remains profoundly out of step.
- A 2023 survey by Sweden-based Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation found that 75% of WHRD respondents or their organisations experienced threats or harassment – a 15-point increase since 2021 – while nearly 25% received death threats and 37% survived assassination attempts.
- In Mesoamerica, between 2012 and 2023, IM-Defensoras documented over 35,000 attacks against almost 9,000 women defenders and 956 organisations, including 200 killings, highlighting a brutal pattern of systematic violence.
- In addition to this, digital spaces have become increasingly unsafe for WHRDs. An Economist Intelligence Unit report identified that 38% of women and girls face online violence, including disinformation, defamation and AI-generated deepfakes, while coordinated cyber-harassment tactics like impersonation and doxxing are escalating globally.
Beyond these physical and digital threats, WHRDs face mounting restrictions through financial and political scrutiny. States have weaponised regulation, compliance requirements and vague national security provisions to monitor, stigmatise and criminalise civil society organisations, especially those engaged in gender justice and feminist organising. Registration requirements, banking restrictions and arbitrary audits are increasingly used to choke the financial lifelines of feminist organisations, undermining not only their advocacy but their very existence. In many contexts, authoritarian governments have perfected a dual strategy that is based on silencing WHRDs through online repression while stifling feminist movements through administrative and financial control. In that context, WHRDs speak of isolation and cognitive dissonance as budgets and solidarity shrink.
The safety and sustainability of WHRDs and feminist movements are now even more precarious in light of shrinking financial support. The recent USAID funding cut, combined with a broader shift by many governments away from resourcing gender rights and feminist organisations, has created a critical gap for those on the frontlines. At the very moment when WHRDs are facing escalating repression, including digital surveillance, smear campaigns, criminalisation and political violence, the lifelines that sustain their work are being severed. As APC has warned, “With the upsurge in right-wing politics across the globe, we can expect further clamping down on civic spaces and silencing of civil society and human rights defenders – along with a corresponding decline in funding available for rights work.” This withdrawal of resources does not only weaken movements’ capacity to resist; it actively emboldens authoritarian states and non-state actors who thrive when feminist voices are marginalised. Without renewed commitments to funding and solidarity, international frameworks risk offering only rhetoric while WHRDs are left to bear the cost of repression in isolation.
In response to these conditions, regional and global feminist networks have sought alternatives that resist both repression and isolation. Feminist initiatives have channelled more flexible core funding to WHRDs and feminist organisations, recognising that survival depends on adaptability and long-term sustainability. Feminist community spaces have created powerful moments, bringing together thousands of feminists from contexts of crisis, from Palestine to Sudan to Myanmar, to collectively reflect on and express solidarity regarding not only the threats they face but also the futures they dare to imagine together. These networks are vital, yet their reach and existence remain fragile in the face of sustained state-corporate partnership and the global retrenchment of funding for gender equality.
This submission, informed by experiences of defenders in the Global South, calls on the Special Rapporteur to highlight that current standards and mechanisms, however principled, risk becoming irrelevant unless they are reimagined to protect those who experience repression not retrospectively, but often every single day. It highlights that while innovative feminist funding models and solidarity networks are beginning to provide some sense of sustainability to grassroots movements, WHRDs remain politically sidelined, chronically underfunded, and digitally and physically targeted. Movements are being forced to navigate simultaneous pressures in the form of violent political repression on the streets, algorithmic harms online, and donor priorities that increasingly shift away from resourcing feminist resistance. It is in this context that we call for recognition of WHRD-led analysis and strategy within the international human rights framework, not as a token voice but as central to the global response to authoritarianism and repression.