Political Declaration on Feminist Approaches to Foreign Policy

September 20, 2023

We, representatives of governments of countries of the FFP+ group, including Albania, Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, France, Germany, Israel, Liberia, Luxembourg, Mexico, Mongolia, Rwanda, Spain, Sweden, The Kingdom of the Netherlands and Tunisia, met in New York on the 20th of September 2023 during the High Level Week of the 78th Session of the United Nations General Assembly for a high-level event on Feminist Foreign Policy.

Gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls in all their diversity are crucial to fully implement the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, promote, protect and fulfill human rights, promote peace and security around the globe and make progress across all goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, especially combatting the feminization of poverty. Against this background, we reaffirm the commitment of our governments to take feminist, intersectional and gender-transformative approaches to our foreign policies, based on mainstreaming gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls in all their diversity, taking into account the multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination to which they may be subjected, in close cooperation with feminist civil society and movements.

Together, we will take the feminist approach to our foreign policies to the next level, based on the following six actions:

1. We demonstrate an ambitious commitment to advance gender equality and the empowerment and autonomy of women and girls in all their diversity, as well as women’s full, equal and meaningful participation at all levels in decision making, to prevent all forms of discrimination and violence against them and promote, protect and fulfill their human rights.
2. We integrate feminist principles throughout our foreign policies to the best of our ability, while acknowledging that members of the FFP+ Group may be at different stages of design, implementation and evaluation of feminist approaches in their foreign policy or Feminist Foreign Policies.
3. We strive to ensure the human rights and social, economic and political representation of all women, as well as their equitable access to resources, which will make our societies just, inclusive and prosperous and will contribute to peacebuilding and sustaining peace.   
4. We collaborate within the UN system, multilateral contexts, regional and bilateral contexts via our capitals and missions abroad to boost our collective efforts towards global gender equality, including by tackling the root causes of unequal power relations and structures.
5. We cooperate closely with feminist civil society and movements to include their voices in our policy-making and decision-making processes, following the principle of ‘nothing about us, without us’.
6. We commit to meet regularly within the context of the Feminist Foreign Policy Plus group in New York and other regional and international fora, to shape feminist foreign policies, and to exchange best practices and lessons learned regarding the different feminist approaches.