The Vatican Joins Iran, Saudi Arabia in Blocking Women’s Rights Agreement at Climate Talks

If I found myself on the same side of certain issues today as the governments of Saudi Arabia, Russia, Egypt, and Iran, I might at least ponder the priors that dropped me into that camp.

That’s the coalition the Vatican aligned with at COP29, the U.N. climate talks ongoing in Baku, Azerbaijan. According to the BBC, the Holy See’s negotiating team joined those oppressive, authoritarian countries in blocking discussion around women’s rights, apparently because of an objection to relevant agreements including any reference to “gender” or transgender women, or to gay women. This is, obviously, a horrifying and bankrupt position to take.

Because the negotiations surrounding what is officially known as the Lima Work Programme on Gender are ongoing this week, most countries have been unwilling to take public stands on the issue. The exception is Colombia (incidentally also the only country with a major nationalized oil industry to have promised to actually stop producing oil), which called the Vatican-joined blockade “unacceptable.”

Women and girls are disproportionately impacted by climate change (though some of the numbers thrown around, like 80 percent of all climate migrants, are of dubious provenance), and the UN’s focus on providing increased support and finance for them is obviously necessary and worthwhile. This corner of the climate talks have been ongoing for a decade, without such objection from the Vatican. Why now? “It is part of a broader global backlash against women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights,” one country’s negotiator said.

A spokesperson for the Vatican said there is still hope for an agreement, with “language acceptable to all” — a sentiment that, at least at this point and given the negotiators’ alignments, certainly sounds hollow.