On March 10, 2025, Nidhi Goyal, Founder and Executive Director of Rising Flame, delivered a powerful statement at the 58th Session of the Human Rights Council, which is being held from February 24 to April 4, 2025, at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. This statement was delivered via pre-recorded video. Speaking on behalf of Akahata along with five other organisations — Rising Flame, Sexual Rights Initiative (SRI), CREA, Women Enabled International, Deaf Women Included, and Diverse Empowerment Foundation — Rising Flame’s intervention focused on advancing the rights of women and girls with disabilities and ensuring their leadership is centred in global processes.
In our statement, Nidhi commended the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Ms. Heba Hagrass, for aligning the Beijing+30 Review with existing global commitments under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). She particularly acknowledged the Special Rapporteur’s efforts to spotlight the leadership of women with disabilities in regional Beijing+30 review processes, emphasizing the importance of this recognition in securing inclusive and representative decision-making spaces. The statement urged the Council to further strengthen the leadership and meaningful participation of women and girls with disabilities, highlighting the critical need to approach this work through an intersectional lens.
A core element of the statement was the call for greater emphasis on decriminalising identities and ensuring full legal capacity for women and girls with disabilities. The statement underscored that restrictive legal frameworks, combined with pervasive social stigma, continue to limit the autonomy and agency of women and gender-diverse persons with disabilities, preventing their full participation in social, economic, and political life. Addressing these structural barriers is essential to fostering inclusive and democratic decision-making processes.
The statement also emphasised the need to strengthen care discourses to ensure robust support for mothers with disabilities, who often face unique barriers and additional costs related to their disabilities while caring for their children, both with and without disabilities. Recognising the complex and often unaccounted-for burdens faced by disabled mothers, the statement called for global frameworks to centre their needs and experiences, ensuring that their rights to caregiving, economic security, and full social inclusion are safeguarded.
A critical concern raised in this statement was the impact of emerging technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) on women and girls with disabilities. The statement stressed the importance of ensuring that AI development and digital technologies do not deepen existing inequalities, and that efforts to bridge the digital divide account for the needs and challenges faced by disabled women and girls.
In closing, we underscored that sustainable funding is crucial to building inclusive ecosystems that ensure disabled women and girls are not left behind in the global push for gender equality and social justice.
The Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Ms. Heba Hagrass, also made critical interventions during the session that aligned with and further strengthened the points raised by Rising Flame. Ms. Hagrass emphasized the importance of disaggregated data collection, noting that comprehensive and detailed data is essential to understanding the diverse and intersecting challenges faced by women and girls with disabilities. Without robust data, she noted, policy responses often fail to capture the full scale of marginalization and exclusion that disabled women experience.
Ms. Hagrass further emphasized the importance of intersectionality, stating that policy approaches must move away from the dual-track method, where gender and disability are addressed separately. Instead, she advocated for holistic policy frameworks that recognize the compounding impact of multiple marginalizations, such as gender, disability, race, and socio-economic status. This approach, she noted, is essential for achieving meaningful inclusion.