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It was an early celebration of the October 10 World Day Against the Death Penalty. On October 8, 2025, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on the “question of the death penalty” by a vote of 31 to 7, with 8 abstentions.

The Council adopts this resolution every other year, but the 2025 text, for the first time, recognizes at the highest levels of the international human rights system the work The Advocates and its Coalition partners have been doing over the past four years to shine a spotlight on women under sentence of death.

Since 2021, The Advocates and its partners have submitted 45 reports on gender and the death penalty to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. The 2025 resolution highlights the impact of this work by “noting the increasing attention paid to [the death penalty] in the most recent work of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women.”

Amy Bergquist, Associate Program Director for International Justice, who attended the Council’s informal consultations on the resolution in September, observes, “during discussions of this paragraph, Singapore pushed back, insisting that there was no evidence that the CEDAW Committee was paying ‘increasing attention’ to the death penalty.” In fact, the Committee had reviewed Singapore’s human rights record in 2024. Thanks in part to two reports from The Advocates and its Coalition partners the Anti Death Penalty Asia Network, the Capital Punishment Justice Project, and the Singapore-based Transformative Justice Collective, the Committee experts grilled Singapore’s delegation on the country’s death penalty practices and how they affect women.

The 2025 resolution also includes for the first time a paragraph “[e]xpressing concern at the specific type of discrimination affecting the sentencing of women and girls, and recalling the importance of their full, equal and meaningful access and participation in defense and their ability to seek legal redress in cases of the death penalty.” This language, in turn, arises out of the UN Secretary-General’s August 2025 report on the question of the death penalty, which relied heavily on several submissions from The Advocates and its partners. Recognizing that The Advocates and its Coalition colleagues often struggle to obtain accurate data about women sentenced to death, the resolution also calls on countries that retain the death penalty to publish complete information about their death penalty practices, “disaggregated by gender” and other factors.

“Not just the final text of the resolution, but also the entire negotiation process, shows that we are influencing international human rights policy. Bolstered by our advocacy with the CEDAW Committee, the Committee has been leveraging the information in our reports to make hard-hitting recommendations to countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore, and the Secretary-General has used our reports to underscore the gender dimension of the death penalty. The resolution is concrete proof that we are making a difference,” concluded Bergquist.