The United Nation’s upcoming comment on the freedom of association must recognize risks unique to women.
At its 144th session, held in July 2025, the United Nations Human Rights Committee decided to develop a General Comment on the Freedom of Association under Article 22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and it launched a call for inputs to inform the preparation of the first draft. In March 2026, the Committee completed the first reading of its first draft. Now, the Committee has invited treaty body members to submit comments ahead of its second reading.
I offer two new elements for consideration: why women’s freedom of association is a determinant of women’s grassroots movements on peace building and the risks posed by the rapidly changing ecosystem of new technologies such as agentic AI and the “internet of things” to women’s civic participation both online and offline.
First, the right of women to assemble in public is integral to sustaining grassroots peace building movements.
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) guarantees citizens the right to “participate in non-governmental organizations and associations concerned with the public and political life of the country.” Likewise, the Convention on the Rights of the Child guarantees children, including girls, the rights to free association and peaceful assembly. Clément Nyaletsossi Voule, the former special rapporteur on peaceful assembly and association, draws attention to grassroots movements, which are engaged in various activities to defend human rights freedom. Many of these movements are being led by previously marginalized individuals and groups, such as women, indigenous people, and youth.
The rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association play an increasingly pivotal role in ensuring inclusive grassroots peace processes in a time of new and protracted conflict. The erosion of these rights can threaten inclusive peace building, especially at the grassroots level.
Often militarization is seen as an exceptional circumstance where normal rules of due process are suspended and the militarization of the state deemed at odds with women’s grassroots peace building. For example, women exercising their fundamental rights to the freedom of association have been systematically targeted by the Taliban with arbitrary detention and intimidation, while women’s participation in any form of public life and right to assembly have been completely denied.
On the other hand, women’ s peace monitoring movements have been instrumental in sustaining peace, including in Mindanao, in the southern Philippines, where Bangsamoro women played an active and historic role in the Mindanao peace process between the Philippine Government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, serving as chief negotiators, and grassroots peacebuilders. Women’s grass roots movements have been key in peace building, from Liberia to Ireland. The Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace and the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition were cross-community and inter-religious organizations of women, comprising both Christian and Muslim Women during the Liberian Civil war and both Protestant and Catholic women during the Northern Ireland War. The freedom of assembly exercised by the Plaza de Mayo Mothers of the Disappeared shaped a new category of “maternal activism” in the evolution of International Law.
In February 2026, an Addendum to General Recommendation No. 30 was adopted by the CEDAW Committee recognizing that the changing nature of war has brought new and emerging challenges for women in conflict. The Addendum calls for support of women’s groups, particularly in preventing conflict or participating in conflict resolution and peace building, and urges the allocation of funding to women-led groups.
In fact, another former Special Rapporteur has enunciated that the right to freedom of association includes not only “the ability of individuals or legal entities to form and join an association but also to seek, receive and use resources–human, material and financial– from domestic, foreign, and international sources.”
Neither the right to freedom of speech nor the right to the freedom of assembly under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights are absolute. However, the Human Rights Committee must recognize the unfettered exercise of the freedom of peaceful assembly for grassroots women’s groups as a cornerstone of peace and security.
Second, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and the “internet of things” (IoT) pose new threats to women’s freedom of association that must be addressed. IoT describes free standing internet-connected devices, that individuals can monitor or control from a remote location, transcending geographic and spatial boundaries. Some organizations predict that the number of such devices worldwide will increase from 27 billion in 2017 to 125 billion in 2030.
Through times of both peace and conflict, the online space is emerging as the new public square. The weaponization of a new generation of AI, including deepfakes, and non-consensual intimate image abuse—threatening to distribute intimate images of a person as a means of control—run the risk of displacing women’s rights to association online, causing women to self-censor, reduce engagement, or withdraw entirely from assembling on online platforms.
The next generation of “agentic AI”—AI tools capable of reasoning on their own and taking autonomous action to achieve goals—present new questions. They have the capacity to give women new empowerment tools. At the same time, agentic AI’s capacity to take autonomous action outside of human control may pose new risks and assert power and control over women’s bodies and threaten their freedom of association and assembly. Although these attributes pose risks to all, these threats may amplify historical power imbalances between genders and magnify new forms of gendered authority over women’s freedom of movement, association, and assembly.
This phenomenon, often termed the “chilling effect,” has been aggravated by AI, as well as the internet of things.
IoT and AI have made surveillance both by public actors and private actors far easier, making it possible to track women’s every movement sparking new and coercive forms of violence against women. While the IoT provides powerful tools for personal protection, it also introduces significant risks of non-consensual surveillance, particularly for women. A dystopian reality is being facilitated through technology-based “smart” software in the home and car. The overall effect of this activity can be a shrinking of the civic space for women as they are being watched, surveyed, and effectively controlled. This duality means that the same software designed to keep women safe and connected can be weaponized for control and harassment, preventing them from exercising the full right to freedom of association.
Although IoT can impact both women and men, given historical power differences and ways in which women’s freedom of assembly has historically been heavily restricted through legal, social, and economic barriers designed to keep them out of the public sphere and political power, the impacts may be felt more intensely by women. As a result of women’s exclusion from public life, their exclusion from male-only organizations, and the suppression of their social movements, women have had to fight to assemble and be heard. The suppression of women’s public engagement, particularly through rapidly changing technology-enhanced surveillance, is a growing threat to the freedom of association. The recent addendum to CEDAW’s General Recommendation 30 addresses “spyware … and its differential impact on women’s … connectivity,” as well as digital threats and the shrinking of civic space. The right to assembly, especially for those whose voices are not always heard, is a tool of conflict prevention and peace building. At the same time, internet shutdowns have been used to stifle the rights of grassroots women human rights defenders to free assembly, as was seen recently in Sudan, in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
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New and Growing Challenges to Women’s Freedom of Association
