29 Oct Which Women Are Worth Protecting? A Feminist Response to the UN Special Rapporteur’s on VAW Letter on Mexico’s Feminicide Law
[Juliana Laguna Trujillo is an international human rights lawyer who works as a legal and advocacy consultant at the Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice.
Akila Radhakrishnan is an independent human rights lawyer and gender justice expert. She is a legal advisor for the End Gender Apartheid Campaign.]
On 31 August 2026, ten years after Paola Buenrostro, a trans sex worker, was killed in Mexico City, police finally arrested the man accused of killing her. Paola’s case advanced the movement that led to the recognition of the crime of transfeminicide in the Criminal Code of Mexico City in 2024. The case of Paola is emblematic of a context of systemic violence against LGBTQI+ persons, and particularly, trans people experience in the region. Therefore, recognising her killing as a transfeminicide matters well beyond her case. It is part of a long feminist struggle over how feminicide should be defined, legally and politically, in line with international law.
This includes recent efforts led by President Claudia Sheinbaum to put before the Congress a General Law to Prevent, Investigate, Punish and Repair the Crime of Feminicide (“Feminicide Bill”), which aims to standardize the definition of the femicide, as well as investigations and punishments across the country. Amongst other measures, the law includes an inclusive definition of the term “woman,” “any person, regardless of age, who is a female or self-identifies as a woman.”
On 30 September, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, wrote to the Mexican government about the General Law. Under the bill as drafted, Paola’s killing is a feminicide. Under Alsalem’s definition, it is not. This is because Alsalem takes issue with the proposed law’s definition of woman (amongst other aspects of the bill) insisting the term be defined with reference to “sex.” In defending her view, Alsalem presents an inaccurate and incompatible reading of international human rights law standards and the principle of non-retrogression in the protection of human rights, to claim that the definition of woman provided by the Feminicide Bill “prevents clear identification of the persons protected and therefore prevents clear identification of the forms of violence of which they are victims.”
In this post, we argue that her position undermines long-standing human rights protection standards under international human rights law, including case law of the Inter-American Court, UN treaty bodies and independent experts, recent ICC jurisprudence on gender persecution, and over twenty years of feminist legal mobilisation in the region While Alsalem seems to have interpreted her mandate to put forward arguments that run counter to the tide of how international law now understands gender, we argue that Mexico’s Feminicide Bill evidences an effort to implement its legal obligations under international law and regional law and precedents that guides the understanding gender-based violence in Latin America.
First, over the past twenty years, legal reform processes have been undertaken across the region with the aim of criminalising feminicide/femicide which broadly refers to the violent death of a woman because of their gender, making visible the extreme expression of violence in patriarchal societies. While the term femicide was coined by Diana Russell in the 1980s, it was in Latin America that the concept has been further developed and given a legal definition. Feminist scholars and practitioners have proposed femicide as the broader concept that encompasses an extreme form of violence against women, while feminicide would encompass an element in which there is a State failure in guaranteeing women’s rights enabling impunity. Legislation in the region are clear in their understanding that this crime would also include trans women and other persons identifying as women.
At the Inter-American system level, this reading has been confirmed by the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) and the MESECVI (the follow-up Mechanism to the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women, known as Belém do Pará Convention).
The IACtHR has determined that sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression of a person are protected categories under the American Convention on Human Rights (see: Atala Riffo and daughters v. Chile (2012); Advisory Opinion OC-24/17 (2017))Further, while Alsalem jumps through legal hoops to insist on a reading of the Belém do Pará Convention as grounded in sex, her suggested interpretative frame is belied by the Court’s jurisprudence. In Vicky Hernández et al. v. Honduras (2021), concerning a trans woman, sex worker and activist killed during the 2009 coup, the Court found that the Belém do Pará Convention “refers to violence against women based on their gender” and that “violence against persons based on gender identity or expression, and especially trans women, is also based on gender.” The Court also notes that obligation contained in Article 9 of the Belém do Pará Convention urges states to ensure that legislation and other measures to prevent and punish violence against women explicitly takes into account intersectional vulnerabilities, which in the Court’s view, includes sexual orientation and gender identity (an interpretation also confirmed by the Inter-American Commission). In Leonela Zelaya et al. v. Honduras (2025), the Court reaffirmed the standard set out in Vicky Hernández regarding the protective scope of the Convention of Belém do Pará for trans women, and strengthened its intersectional approach in understanding structural violence suffered by trans persons. It held Honduras responsible for the repeated arbitrary detentions of Leonela Zelaya, a trans woman, sex worker and HIV positive person, and for disregarding her gender identity and expression when investigating her death.
For Mexico, these standards apply directly through conventionality control. Mexican authorities are bound by the Inter-American Court’s cases law, including judgments delivered against other States. Accordingly, Mexico’s proposed Feminicide Bill, in including an inclusive definition of woman that takes into account gender identity, does exactly this–in compliance with its obligations under regional instruments and jurisprudence.
At the international level, both international human rights and criminal law provide further guidance in understanding the protections for gender, including gender identity, that are relevant to Mexico’s Feminicide Bill. While Alsalem argues that sex is the primary protection under human rights treaties, in particular CEDAW, the Convention’s interpretation by the CEDAW Committee demonstrates a more expansive approach. For example, in General Recommendation 28 (2010), the Committee explicitly noted that while CEDAW “only refers to sex-based discrimination” interpreting the treaty’s provisions together indicates that “the Convention covers gender-based discrimination against women.” The Committee in later General Recommendations, including 35 (2017), has expanded on this point, noting that a range of intersectional factors inform the experience of discrimination against women, including “being lesbian, bisexual, transgender or intersex.” A recent joint statement from 47 UN Special Procedures (not including Alsalem) stated that “legal and policy frameworks that…impose rigid divisions between sex and gender, are limited in their ability to meaningfully address structural inequality or ensure the full realization of women’s and girls’ universal human rights.” The experts also argue that employing a binary definition of sex undermines a state’s compliance with its obligations under CEDAW to eliminate gender stereotypes.
Further, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights noted in General Comment No. 20 that the ground of “sex” has evolved to cover not only “physiological characteristics but also the social construction of gender stereotypes, prejudices and expected roles.” The Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health articulates an intersectional, non-binary and non-discriminatory approach to gender-based violence that encompasses sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics and is sustained in a robust corpus juris of international law instruments and jurisprudence.
At the ICL level, the definition of gender under the Rome Statute, particularly the phrase “within the context of society” points to the social meanings attached to sex. The ICC Office of the Prosecutor’s policies on Gender-Based Crimes and the Crime of Gender Persecution utilizes this reading. It understands “context of society” as the social constructs and criteria used to define gender, including sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression. It defines gender persecution as the targeting of persons because of their sex characteristics, the social constructs used to define gender, or both and it recognizes LGBTQI+ persons among the groups that may be targeted, clarifying that intersex, non-binary and transgender persons may be persecuted for not belonging to the categories “male/men” or “female/women” as the perpetrator defines them.
ICC judges have endorsed this reading. On 8 July 2025, Pre-Trial Chamber II issued arrest warrants for the Taliban’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and its chief justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani (unsealed on 5 October 2026). It found reasonable grounds to believe they had committed the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds against girls, women and other persons who did not conform to the Taliban’s views on gender, gender identity or expression. It added that some of these people were targeted because their expressions of sexuality or gender identity were regarded as inconsistent with those views. The Chamber held that the Rome Statute’s definition of gender must be interpreted beyond a purely biological conception of sex. It also held that gender norms, meaning the socially constructed roles, behaviours, expectations and hierarchies associated with sex, form part of the lens through which gender persecution must be assessed. Similarly, Pre-Trial Chamber I confirmed charges for gender persecution in the El Hishricase finding that “actual and perceived LGBTQI+ persons were targeted for arrest and detention because they did not conform to the Mitiga Perpetrators’ views and expectations on gender.”
The lesson for feminicide legislation is relevant as the understanding of gender does not pertain to only women and girls but understands the wider context in which gender is instrumentalised and weaponised to commit serious crimes that can amount to gender-based crimes. International and regional laws and precedents are clear: the utilization of a definition of woman solely grounded in biological sex would violate a state’s obligation relevant to the elimination of gender-based discrimination and violence. Mexico’s current draft Feminicide Bill is in line with these obligations.
The law is now before Congress, and a robust legislative process that takes into consideration Mexico’s international obligations should take place. What can’t happen is that the bill narrows its scope of protection. The feminist international law project has advocated to name, end and prevent gender-based violence in all their diversity. Paola Buenrostro and her family waited nearly a decade for that refusal to reach her case. A national feminicide law should make sure no one else has to.