In June 2026, at the Organization of American States’ General Assembly in Panama City, Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand announced that Canada had ratified the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women, also known as the Belém do Pará Convention. It is a startlingly overdue step. The convention has existed for over thirty years, and Canada was, until this year, one of only three OAS member states (alongside the United States and Cuba) that had never joined it. Critics of international human rights instruments will say, not unreasonably, that conventions are just words: flimsy commitments, signed at podiums and then forgotten. But that cynicism sells the moment short. Although ratification is not the end of the struggle against gender-based violence in Canada, it is a meaningful marker of legal, political, and moral commitment, and it deserves to be welcomed.
The Belém do Pará Convention was adopted by OAS member states in 1994 in Brazil, and it was the first legally binding international treaty to explicitly recognize violence against women as a human rights violation and to define the “due diligence” obligations states owe their citizens in response. Article 7 requires states parties to refrain from committing violence against women through their own agents, apply due diligence to prevent, investigate, and punish such violence, and reform domestic laws and administrative practices that enable it. It has guided legislative and institutional reform across the hemisphere for three decades and, as Global Affairs Canada’s press release notes, ratification followed close consultation between Ottawa and the provinces and territories, and is meant to strengthen collaboration with civil society and Indigenous partners on prevention and response, including restorative justice. The OAS itself has called Canada’s accession a reflection of the treaty’s status as the most signed and ratified instrument in the inter-American system, with 32 states parties now joined by Canada.
None of this is abstract. Violence against women remains a stubborn, and in some respects worsening, crisis in Canada. Statistics Canada reported that the rate of police-reported intimate partner violence grew 14% between 2018 and 2024, with women victimized at three-and-a-half times the rate of men. Femicide, meanwhile, is trending in the wrong direction: StatCan shows 2024 alone saw 187 women killed in Canada, and Lawyers without Borders reports a 23% increase in femicides since 2019. The burden falls most heavily on Indigenous women and girls, who make up roughly 4% of Canada’s population but account for around 16% of female homicide victims (Assembly of First Nations), and whose homicide rate has been measured at roughly six times higher than that of non-Indigenous women (StatCan). The 2019 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, described this pattern as a Canadian genocide and explicitly called on Canada to ratify Belém do Pará as one of its recommendations. This ratification, then, answers a demand that Indigenous women, families, and advocates have been making for years.
There is also a historical throughline worth noting. In 1967, Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson established the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, after sustained pressure from a coalition of thirty-two women’s organizations led by activist Laura Sabia. That commission’s 1970 report, with 167 recommendations, is widely regarded as the founding document of Canada’s modern women’s rights infrastructure. Against that backdrop, this ratification is both a fitting continuation of Pearson’s legacy and also a reminder of how much work remains. Nearly six decades after that first landmark inquiry, Canada is only now catching up to a regional human rights standard most of its hemispheric neighbours embraced a generation ago.
Canada’s current federal government has faced some scrutiny about where it stands on women’s rights more broadly. Ratification comes just months after Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters at the G20 summit in Johannesburg that he would no longer describe Canada’s foreign policy as a “feminist foreign policy,” a break from the branding Justin Trudeau’s government had used since 2015. Carney insisted that gender equality and combating gender-based violence remain “aspects” of Canadian foreign policy, but critics saw the comment, paired with cuts to foreign aid, as a retreat. Against that backdrop, ratifying Belém do Pará is a welcome and concrete counter-signal.
Beyond symbolism, ratification carries real significance on four fronts. First, advocates and survivors’ organizations now have a binding international instrument they can invoke in public advocacy and in pressing governments at all levels for action. Second, while Canada’s dualist legal system means the convention does not automatically become enforceable domestic law, ratification puts Canada under an ongoing obligation monitored through the OAS follow-up mechanism, MESECVI, to bring its laws and practices into conformity. This creates real pressure for legislative follow-through. Third, Canada now formally joins 32 other states undertaking coordinated hemispheric action against violence against women, gaining both a platform to contribute and a body of regional experience to draw on. Finally, ratification reaffirms Canada’s commitment to the idea of universal human rights at a moment when that idea is under strain globally.
Ratification, in short, is long overdue but genuinely welcome. Its ultimate significance, however, will be measured not by the announcement in Panama City but by what Parliament and the government actually do next – what legislation follows, what funding is sustained, and whether Indigenous women, girls, and all women in Canada are measurably safer because of it. The critics who call such conventions mere words are not entirely wrong; words alone won’t end this violence. But refusing to make the commitment at all would have been worse. Now it falls to Ottawa to prove the skeptics wrong.
By: Sofia Robinson, Research Assistant, The Pearson Centre
Works Cited
Court outcomes in homicides of Indigenous women and girls, 2009 to 2021, Statcan, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2023001/article/00006-eng.htm
Rights and Justice, Assembly of First Nations, https://afn.ca/rights-justice/murdered-missing-indigenous-women-girls/
Femicide in Canada: why incorporate this concept into the Criminal code?, Lawyers Without Borders, https://asfcanada.ca/en/medias/feminicide-in-canada-why-incorporate-this-concept-into-the-criminal-code/
Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, Government of Canada, https://www.canada.ca/en/crown-indigenous-relations-northern-affairs.html
Trends in police-reported family violence and intimate partner violence in Canada, 2024, Statcan, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/251028/dq251028a-eng.htm
Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women (Convention of Belém do Pará), https://www.oas.org/en/mesecvi/docs/BelemDoPara-ENGLISH.pdf
Canada ratifies Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women, Global Affairs Canada, https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2026/06/canada-ratifies-inter-american-convention-on-the-prevention-punishment-and-eradication-of-violence-against-women.html
Follow-up Mechanism to the Belém do Pará Convention (MESECVI), Organization of American States, https://www.oas.org/en/mesecvi/convention.asp
Press Release, Organization of American States, https://www.oas.org/en/media_center/press_release.asp?sCodigo=E-012/25
YWCA Toronto Welcomes Canada’s Ratification of the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence Against Women (Belém do Pará Convention), YWCA, https://www.ywcatoronto.org/takeaction/pressreleasesandmedia/statement-on-canadas-ratification-of-the-belem-do-para-convention
Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada, Government of Canada, https://www.canada.ca/en/women-gender-equality/commemorations-celebrations/royal-commission-status-women-canada.html
Putting Women and Girls First: The Case for Canada’s Feminist Foreign Policy, The Pearson Centre, https://thepearsoncentre.ca/putting-women-and-girls-first-the-case-for-canadas-feminist-foreign-policy/?v=5435c69ed3bc