Closing session

Final Declaration of the 1st P20 Meeting of Women Parliamentarians

Charter of Alagoas

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We, the P20 Women Parliamentarians, the G20 parliamentary forum, met on July 1st and 2nd, 2024, in the city of Maceió in the State of Alagoas, Brazil, with the purpose of discussing the expansion of female participation within decision-making spaces;

Upon acknowledging the historical importance of the 1st P20 Meeting of the Women Parliamentarians, a key event within the G20 Parliamentary Speakers’ Summit (P20), we celebrate this multilateral forum aimed at furthering female parliamentarians’ diplomatic and strategic participation in the G20 by bringing discussions on the existing challenges and opportunities for advancing women’s rights universally;

And upon restating the commitment assumed during the Ninth G20 Parliamentary Speakers’ Summit (P20) in India, we commit to and call on P20 leaders to assess and enhance women’s participation in Parliaments by taking steps to bridge recognized gaps and expand women’s participation;

We hereby point out the following topics as the main contributions shared during the roundtable discussions of the 1st P20 Meeting of Women Parliamentarians:

  1. Recommending that annual P20 working sessions initiate with the Meeting of Women Parliamentarians, thereby consolidating the space as a platform for discussions, exchange of experiences, and prioritizing and promoting equality.
  2. Promoting efforts to intersectionally transversalize gender across both parliamentary and government roles, and to that end, allocating all required financial, technical and human resources, with the purpose of devising legislative agendas and proposals, in addition to conducting gender-sensitive legal reforms, including those related to climate change, in order to enhance the human rights of women and girls to the full extent of their diversity, and to promote the principle of non-discrimination and equality under the law.
  3. Stressing the need to enforce Special Temporary Measures, such as, for instance, quotas, minimum number of seats reserved and allocating funding aimed not only at expanding the participation of women in power and decision-making spaces, but also at achieving equality. Moreover, efforts deployed to ensure that increasing numbers of women occupy positions of power must also account for elected office positions, in addition to administrative roles at all State levels and scopes of activities.
  4. Reporting the severity of gender-based political violence and its consequences, which negatively impact women’s performance of their political rights, and recommending the enforcement of integrated, efficient and comprehensive measures to prevent, end and answer to this type of violence.
  1. Calling on G20 States and P20 Members to introduce measures aimed at recognizing, mitigating, redistributing and giving due value to unpaid care and domestic work undertaken by women and girls. Furthermore, acknowledging that an unbalanced workload of this kind restricts women’s capacity to engage in decision-making processes and to take on leadership roles, in addition to posing substantial constraints on the education of women and girls, as well as potential economic and entrepreneurial opportunities for them.
  2. Calling on G20 States and P20 Members to promote comprehensive care policies and systems, in addition to funding mechanisms that allow for investments in transformative care policies, as part of policies that seek to attain decent work for all. We further advocate for integral care policies to be included within the scope of the G20’s efforts against hunger and poverty.
  3. Calling on G20 States and P20 Members to acknowledge the key role that women’s economic rights, their economic empowerment and financial independence have in achieving the 2030 Agenda. Moreover, we point to the need of deploying legislative reforms as well as other measures to ensure equal rights between men and women, as well as between boys and girls, regarding access to economic and productive resources. Furthermore, we stress the critical need for women to be provided with equal opportunities to achieve full and productive employment, decent work and equal pay for equal work.
  4. Leveraging funding, including all national and international, and public and private sources of policies and programs concerning climate change, the environment and the intersectionality of gender-based disaster risk reduction, including efforts deployed by women’s organizations and movements that devise and enforce sustainable, just and long-term solutions based on local knowledge.

In light of the countless constructive discussions held during the 1st P20 Meeting of the Women Parliamentarians, this joint declaration, in its full draft, will be shared with all forum participants, after which it will be submitted to the P20 Presidency, which, in turn, has already undertaken to take it to the G20 Presidency and assist with disclosing it across the entire G20 community.

This will consequently enable us to seek that the contributions summarized herein, along with the general contributions of the P20, support the G20 decision-making processes taking place this year in Brazil.

Finally, we would like to salute the P20 Presidency and all women parliamentarians who  attended this historic 1st P20 Meeting of Women Parliamentarians.

Maceió, State of Alagoas, July 2, 2024.

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