The corridors of the United Nations vibrated with a renewed sense of urgency this March as the 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70) convened in New York. While the agenda was broad, a singular, resonant theme emerged from the plenaries and side events: the “justice gap.” From the digital frontlines where adolescent girls battle systemic harassment to the quiet, often overlooked struggles of older women fighting for their right to inherit ancestral land, the quest for legal equity remains a fractured journey. At CSW70, advocates made it clear that justice cannot be a static concept; it must be a dynamic, lifelong guarantee that evolves alongside the women it is meant to protect.
The statistics framing the discussion remain a sobering reminder of the work ahead. Globally, women still hold only about two-thirds of the legal rights afforded to men. Despite decades of international treaties and domestic reforms, the world has yet to see a single country achieve full, unadulterated legal equality for women and girls. This gap is not merely a legal technicality; it is a chasm that swallows the potential of millions. The 70th session highlighted that these disparities are most acute at the bookends of life—childhood and old age—where vulnerability is highest and legal protections are often at their thinnest.
On March 8, the annual CSW Youth Forum set the stage for this intergenerational reckoning. It was followed on March 13 by a high-level panel discussion titled “Intergenerational approaches to access to justice across the life-course.” These events, curated by UN Women, were designed to be more than just talk shops. They functioned as a laboratory for ideas, bringing together young feminists, veteran activists, civil society leaders, and high-level policymakers to dismantle the age-based barriers that prevent women from claiming their fundamental rights. The central takeaway was clear: a justice system that ignores the specificities of age is a system that fails half the population.
For the youngest generation, the barriers to justice are often rooted in a lack of agency and the rapid evolution of the digital world. Adolescent girls and young women frequently navigate a landscape of limited legal literacy, where they are unaware of their rights or how to exercise them. Furthermore, parental restrictions often act as a gatekeeper, preventing minors from participating in justice processes even when they are the victims of crime. The rise of digital surveillance and online violence has created a new frontier of fear; many young women are deterred from reporting harassment because of the stigma surrounding sexual and reproductive health or the threat of further digital retaliation.
The situation is compounded for those living in regions of instability. Data presented at the forum revealed that women’s exposure to conflict has surged by 50 percent over the last decade. In these post-conflict and high-tension settings, younger women find themselves in a state of heightened legal vulnerability, where traditional justice systems have collapsed and the “rule of law” is often replaced by the rule of the strongest.
Wanjiku Njuguna, a coding student and youth advocate from Kenya, spoke passionately about the need for a protective environment for the next generation. “It is important to build justice systems that believe girls, protect girls, and make space for every girl’s voice, including girls with disabilities and neurodivergent,” she stated. Her call for a system that “believes girls” strikes at the heart of the institutional bias that often dismisses the testimonies of the young as unreliable or secondary.
As the dialogue shifted to the challenges faced by older women, a different but equally systemic set of obstacles emerged. For many women in the later stages of life, the justice gap is the result of a lifetime of accumulated inequality. Pension exclusions, a lack of formal identification or documentation, and deep-seated cultural barriers to property and inheritance rights leave many older women in a state of economic precariousness. Perhaps most pervasive is the legal invisibility of unpaid care work. Throughout their lives, women contribute trillions of dollars to the global economy through domestic labor, yet this contribution is rarely recognized in legal claims regarding social security or divorce settlements in old age.
Maryam Bibi, the Founder and Chief Executive of Khwendo Kor in Pakistan, articulated the multifaceted nature of these hurdles. “The barriers for older women are multiple and at all levels,” she noted. “They also include information barriers, financial barriers, legal barriers, cultural, economic and institutional and systemic barriers, because the system is not ready to solve the barriers that older women face.” Bibi’s observation highlights a critical flaw in modern legal architecture: it is often designed for a “standard” citizen who is neither young nor old, leaving those at the margins to navigate a system that was never built with their lived realities in mind.
The CSW70 discussions emphasized that these generational struggles are not isolated. They are connected by a thread of patriarchal norms and institutional biases that adapt to different life stages. To close this gap, participants called for an “intergenerational and intersectional lens” on justice reform. This means recognizing that a girl who is denied an education today is the same woman who will be denied a pension forty years from now.
The power of this intergenerational approach was best exemplified by the massive consultative process that informed the Youth Forum. More than 23,000 young people and adolescents from over 75 countries participated in a series of community, national, and regional consultations. This effort culminated in the Global Youth and Adolescents Recommendations, a document that reflects the collective demands of a generation. A key milestone in this process was the Virtual Global Adolescent Girl Leadership Town Hall held in February 2026. This event allowed over 100 girls under the age of 19, hailing from 50 different countries, to speak directly to the power structures of the UN. They shared harrowing and hopeful stories of navigating justice systems, providing a roadmap for policymakers to make these systems more responsive to the realities of girlhood.
The recommendations emerging from CSW70 are concrete and ambitious. They include the expansion of legal literacy initiatives that use local and indigenous languages, the strengthening of gender-responsive legal aid, and the immediate repeal of discriminatory laws that favor male heirs or husbands. Furthermore, there is a call for the meaningful participation of women of all ages in the actual drafting of justice reform legislation.
However, systemic change requires more than just policy tweaks; it requires coordinated partnerships. The forum underscored that no single actor—whether a government, a UN agency, or a local NGO—can dismantle these structural barriers alone. It requires a “life-course” commitment from development partners and international institutions to fund and support justice systems that are accessible from birth to old age.
Lopa Banerjee, the Director of UN Women’s Civil Society Division, captured the spirit of the session in her closing remarks. “When women across generations shape the agenda together, justice stops being an abstract principle,” she said. “It becomes something real, something lived.”
As CSW70 concluded, the message taken home by delegates was one of solidarity. The fight for justice is not a relay race where one generation hands off the baton to the next; it is a collective marathon where all generations run together. By centering the voices of those who have been historically marginalized by both their gender and their age, the global community has begun the hard work of building a world where the law is a shield for the vulnerable, rather than a barrier to the brave. The commitment made in New York is clear: justice must work for every woman, at every stage of her life, without exception.
