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Over the past year The Advocates has expanded its work to abolish the death penalty worldwide. A longstanding member of the Steering Committee of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, The Advocates collaborates with Coalition members to bring their expertise to the United Nations, leveraging human rights bodies to press their governments to make progress toward abolition.

For the last three years, The Advocates has added a gender dimension to that advocacy, shedding light on the invisible reality of women sentenced to death. The results are dramatic. Experts on the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women praised a closed-door briefing with The Advocates and Coalition partners as “an eye-opener,” “very enlightening,” and “fantastic!”

The Advocates’ recent collaboration with the Singapore-based Transformative Justice Collective prompted the Committee in May 2024 to recommend that Singapore not only “halt the execution of all women,” but also “[e]nsure a gender-responsive application of the law so that” courts adequately account for “evidence of trauma, economic pressures, child marriage, and domestic and gender-based violence” in criminal proceedings against women.

International Justice Associate Program Director Amy Bergquist observes that “over the past year alone the CEDAW Committee has issued hard-hitting recommendations on death penalty issues in Jamaica, Kuwait, Malaysia, Oman, and Singapore. Our impact is clear. Before we initiated this project, the Committee had never even mentioned the death penalty. Now these experts are voices for women on death row around the world.”

Building on these experiences, in September The Advocates led a workshop in Philadelphia to empower Coalition members to engage in advocacy with UN gender mechanisms and to “transversalize” gender into all UN advocacy. This work has garnered attention at the highest levels of the UN. In an August report to the General Assembly, the Secretary General called on UN member states “to pay more attention to the gender dimension of the death penalty, including by addressing multiple forms of gender bias facing women sentenced to death and taking full account of gender-related mitigating factors during sentencing, such as a history of surviving genderbased violence. States should offer gender-sensitive health care to women on death row and provide for the needs of women on death row who are incarcerated together with their children.”

This article was featured in our 2025 edition of the Human Rights Observer, The Advocates yearly magazine. Read the full publication here.