Leavides Domingo-Cabarrubias  | 4 March 2026

This International Women’s Day 2026, the United Nations calls for urgent action to dismantle the barriers that deny women and girls equal justice, including discriminatory laws, weak legal protections, and entrenched social norms and harmful practices. At the heart of this agenda is a central human rights concern: women’s right to life — the most fundamental of all human rights — continues to be threatened by state violence in diverse contexts.

Violations of the right to life occur in both direct and indirect forms.Under international human rights law, the right to life goes beyond the prohibition of arbitrary deprivation of life; it also imposes positive obligations on States to protect individuals from foreseeable threats to life, to enact a protective legal framework that prohibits violence that are likely to result in deprivation of life, and to ensure accountability when violations occur. Former UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Agnes Callamard, has advocated a gender-sensitive approach to arbitrary killings, arguing for a broader reconceptualising of the right to life to include arbitrary deprivation of life resulting from systemic discrimination. Gender-based killings of women – the killing of women because they are women – even when committed by non-State actors, may constitute arbitrary killing when the State fails to prevent, investigate, or prosecute such cases. This broader conceptualisation of the right to life was echoed in the 2023 report by Eleos Justice and Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, which defined ‘State-sanctioned killing of women and girls’ as encompassing not only those directly perpetrated by the State, such as the death penalty and extrajudicial killings, but also gender-motivated killings that States condone, excuse, or fail to prevent.

One of the most direct forms of State-sanctioned killing remains the death penalty. Approximately 35 countries retain capital punishment in law and practice. Although women constitute a small minority of individuals on death row, and capital punishment rarely discriminates against women in substance, the application of capital punishment frequently mirrors, and at times exacerbates, the gender discrimination and violence underlying women’s pathways to criminalisation. Many countries continue to sentence women to death under conditions that are blind to the specific vulnerabilities within which women commit crimes, and through legal processes that are deeply gendered.  For example, globally, the majority of women on death row have been convicted of homicide, frequently involving the killing of a husband or family member in contexts of prolonged domestic abuse. Yet courts often fail to treat histories of gender-based violence as significant mitigating factors. In Iran, of 75 women executed for homicide between 2010 and 2024 for which information was available (114 women were executed for homicide during this period, but details could not be obtained for the rest) 69 per cent had killed a husband or intimate partner. Eleven were documented survivors of domestic violence, 8 had been married as children, and 4 reportedly acted in self-defence against rape. Similarly, women convicted of drug offences – the second largest group of women on death row globally – are often driven into the drug trade by economic marginalisation and lack of viable livelihood options. Yet such structural vulnerabilities are rarely given meaningful weight in sentencing.

State violence also manifests in the lethal repression of protest movements, where women face distinct and gendered risks. During the recent crackdown on protests in Iran, reports indicated sharply rising death tolls, yet even though Iranian women have long stood at the forefront of protest movements, and they are undoubtedly among the victims, their bodies remain conspicuously absent from public view. Many women last seen at demonstrations, in detention, or in hospitals were later reported missing, with little or no official disclosure about their fate. The Hana Human Rights Organization reported that the bodies of 50 women protesters were being held as ‘unidentified’ at the Kahrizak forensic complex. The continued classification of these women as ‘unidentified’, coupled with the lack of clarity surrounding their deaths, has been described as a form of ‘political erasure’ – an attempt to control how death is recorded, acknowledged, and publicly understood. Delays or refusals in returning bodies to families further undermine principles of human dignity, transparency, and accountability.

In Bangladesh, government forces responding to the widespread July–August 2024 protests were reportedly responsible for hundreds of extrajudicial killings and other unlawful uses of force. Within this broader repression, women were deliberately targeted and subjected to sexual and gender-based violence, including sexual assault and threats of rape — underscoring the gendered dimensions of State violence even in contexts not immediately framed as women’s rights issues.

Gender-motivated killings of women —referred to by UN Women as ‘femicide/feminicide’ — remain a pervasive global crisis, with little evidence of meaningful progress despite years of international commitments to eliminate gender-based violence. The latest data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and UN Women indicate that one woman or girl is killed approximately every 10 minutes by an intimate partner or family member. In 2024 alone, an estimated 83,000 women and girls were killed intentionally: of these, 60 per cent were killed by intimate partners or close relatives.  The persistence of femicide in many countries reflects profound failures in State responses to gender-based violence. The obligation to protect the right to life requires more than the adoption of formal legal frameworks – it entails ensuring their effective implementation through functioning institutions, accessible justice mechanisms, and meaningful reparations. States must also take preventive measures to address the structural and intersectional discrimination, gender bias, and harmful social norms that sustain patterns of lethal violence against women.

Beyond these contexts, violations of the right to life also arise from systemic discrimination that exposes women and girls to preventable deaths.  The deprivation of basic conditions necessary for survival, including access to food, water, and essential medical care, can also amount to violations of the right to life. For example, the latest available data from the World Health Organization reveals that one woman dies every two minutes from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Unsafe abortion, one of the leading causes of maternal death globally, is most prevalent in contexts where abortion is heavily restricted in law or practice, forcing women to resort to unsafe procedures.

On this International Women’s Day, the call for equal justice must therefore be understood not only as a demand for formal legal equality, but as a demand for the full protection of women’s lives. Safeguarding the right to life requires confronting both private and public forms of violence, recognising the gendered pathways that place women at risk, and holding States accountable — not only for killings they directly perpetrate, but also for those they permit, ignore, or enable.