(ZENIT News – Center for Family and Human Rights / NY, 13.11.2026).- The General Assembly is finalizing a new Crimes Against Humanity treaty that may punish opponents of gender ideology and abortion rights as international criminals.
The treaty opens the possibility of prosecuting political, religious, and civil opponents of gender ideology under the international crime of “gender persecution.” The treaty could also make denial of abortion or public support for restrictive abortion laws part of the international crime of “forced pregnancy.”
Over the next two weeks, member states are expected to decide the dates of two ten-day conferences to finalize and adopt the new treaty in 2028 and 2029. During those conferences, they will discuss formal proposals to the draft text of the treaty from member states.
The draft of the treaty already has an open definition of gender. The official commentary on the draft treaty expressly says that gender is a social construct and adds “sexual orientation and gender identity” as elements of the term. Read together with the guidance of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on the crime of “gender persecution,” this leaves no doubt as to how it will be applied.
A 2022 official policy of the ICC prosecutor defines the crime of gender-based persecution as including laws and regulations based on the gender of an individual that affect “their reproductive and family options, who they can marry, whether they can attend school, where they can work, how they can dress and whether they are simply allowed to exist.” Opposition to homosexual marriage, surrogacy, transgender bathroom and sports policies, as well as advocacy for women-only spaces and parental rights could all be considered a crime under this approach.
This is not a hypothetical application of the concept of “crimes against humanity.” In March 2026, a Finnish elected member of parliament, Päivi Räsänen, was convicted of hate speech under Finland’s “Crimes Against Humanity” legislation for a pamphlet published twenty years ago that upheld Biblical family values and criticized homosexuality.
In the amendment proposals to the draft of the treaty submitted earlier this year, several progressive nations supported the current open definition of gender in the treaty. Thirteen nations asked for gender to be defined as referring to men and women and nothing else, or to replace the term gender with sex altogether.
Nordic countries, Uruguay, Australia, Belgium, Colombia, France, and Spain asked for a broad new category of crimes against humanity for “sexual and reproductive violence,” that could be broadly interpreted as implying a fundamental human right to comprehensive sexuality education, sexual autonomy for children, and access to abortion and contraception without parental consent. Several of the same nations want a new crime of “gender apartheid”, an accusation that has been hurled at the Vatican for its teaching on male-female complementarity.
Nordic countries, Uruguay, and Hungary asked to remove a caveat to the crime of “forced pregnancy” that prevents it from implying abortion rights. They called this caveat a “relic” of the Rome Statute.
The new treaty is intended to widen the reach of international criminal law beyond the current scope of the International Criminal Court. While the International Criminal Court has a limited international jurisdiction, the new treaty will govern the national criminal justice systems of all parties to the treaty, granting them jurisdiction for international crimes committed anywhere by any person who is within their borders. It will require them to outlaw and prosecute established international crimes such as genocide, extrajudicial killings, and rape as a weapon of war alongside the new crimes that are still being negotiated.
The United States did not make any formal amendment proposals or take a position on the new treaty since Trump began his second term as U.S. president. The Biden White House strongly supported the treaty alongside progressive and European allies. There is a possibility that a Democrat will be in the White House in 2029 when the treaty is scheduled to be finalized and adopted.
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