The 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70) will take place from 09 to 20 March 2026, bringing together representatives of Member States, UN entities, and ECOSOC-accredited non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from across the world to discuss the priority theme of ‘ensuring and strengthening access to justice for all women and girls, including by promoting inclusive and equitable legal systems, eliminating discriminatory laws, policies, and practices, and addressing structural barriers’.
Across Asia and the Pacific, women and girls—particularly those from marginalized and excluded communities—continue to face significant obstacles in accessing justice. These include discriminatory legal frameworks, weak enforcement mechanisms, limited legal literacy, economic barriers, digital divides, conflict and displacement, and intersecting forms of discrimination based on gender, disability, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, and migration status. And those with multiple barriers face compounded injustice.
Civil society organisations (CSOs) play a critical role in advancing legal reform, providing survivor-centred services, documenting rights violations, and amplifying the lived experiences of women and girls. Meaningful civil society engagement is therefore essential to shaping regional priorities and strengthening outcomes for CSW 70. In facilitation of this, UN Women ROAP has joined hands with the Asia Pacific CSO Forum Steering Committee comprising organisations such as the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD), Asia Pacific Alliance for SRHR (APA), Asia Pacific Resource & Research Centre for Women (ARROW), Asia Pacific Women’s Watch (APWW) and Fiji Women’s Rights Movement (FWRM) to organise an Asia Pacific Regional CSO Forum on the Priority Theme of the CSW70 in hybrid format from 27 to 28 January 2026., preceding the Asia-Pacific Regional Preparatory Meeting on CSW 70, This Regional CSO Forum aims to collectively examine and identify actionable regional priorities and put forth recommendations for the CSW70 session and the agreed conclusions on the priority theme.
The Collective Statement from the AP CSO Forum on CSW 70th can be found