by Stefano Gennarini JD, C-Fam
Former European colonial powers France and the Netherlands want all nations to punish the new crime of “gender-related killings” or “femicide.” They are asking for a commitment in a General Assembly resolution on violence against women.
According to UN agencies, such crimes include the denial of abortion for any reason.
In negotiations this week, European diplomats asked delegates to withdraw their objections to such new crimes. “This resolution is not binding,” they told delegates. “We are not negotiating a treaty,” they stated. Europeans routinely use such assertions to overcome objections to controversial policies. While UN resolutions are not binding on States, they are binding on the UN system and are used in court proceedings.
If adopted as drafted, the resolution would give the UN system marching orders to promote gender ideology in criminal laws and commit UN member states to adopt gender ideology crimes.
The new category is not objectively provable. It does not seek to punish violence based on the sex of the victim. That is already a stand-alone crime or aggravating factor in roughly half of all nations. The new category seeks to criminalize the subjective intent of the perpetrator as “gender related.”
In other words, gender-related killings or femicide are a category of thought crime. The idea behind such criminal reforms based on gender ideology is to punish anyone for the way they think about gender. Their scope is broader than just criminal law.
The purpose of these campaigns is to overhaul all legal, political, social, cultural, and economic institutions, and even religion, in line with gender ideology, including promoting abortion and sex-rejecting procedures. Only in this way, proponents argue, can entire societies begin to change the way they think about gender to prevent gender-based violence.