OPENING REMARKS, Christina Meinecke, Representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to the European Union.

8 October 2026, UN House in Brussels.

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Dear colleagues, partners and friends,

It is a great pleasure to welcome you to UN House for the fourth edition of our annual Racism, Discrimination and Health gathering.

I would like to begin by thanking our colleagues at the European Public Health Alliance, and particularly the DisQo Stakeholder Network, for this sustained partnership.

Since 2023, OHCHR and EPHA have worked together to create a space where people with lived experience, civil society, researchers, health professionals and policymakers can speak frankly about an issue that has too often remained at the margins of both health and anti-racism policy: racism is a determinant of health.

Many of you have been part of the journey as to how the conversation evolved over these past four years. From the challenges faced by people of African descent in the realization of their right to health, to looking at racism as a determinant of physical and mental health, to exploring racial trauma, and the role of culture and artistic expression in healing. We continue to provide spaces to bring visibility to topics that have traditionally received less attention and to bring those to the attention of EU policy-makers including through the 50+ recommendations which were submitted in the context of the 2026-2030 EU Anti Racism Strategy elaboration, and which were taken up to different degrees.

Now we are in the stage of supporting the implementation of the EU Anti Racism Strategy and its right to health dimension. Our conversation today will focus on the intersection of racism, gender-based violence and women’s health, including violence and discrimination that can occur within healthcare itself.

Again we have chosen a topic, on which more work needs to be done.

Healthcare is not simply another service. It is a place to which we come at moments of particular vulnerability. We place our bodies, our pain, our pregnancies, our reproductive choices, and sometimes our lives in the hands of others. We therefore have a right to expect that healthcare will be a place of safety and dignity.

But healthcare can also become a site where violence is exercised. The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in its General Comment 37 refers to the right to control one’s health and body, including sexual and reproductive freedom, and the freedom from interference, such as the right to be free from torture, non-consensual medical treatment and experimentation and how racial bias, stigmatization and structural inequalities expose individuals and groups within the purview of the Convention to various forms of coercion, either by imposing treatments or by denying health services.

The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women has recognised mistreatment and violence in reproductive health services and during facility-based childbirth as a human rights violation and a form of gender-based violence. The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has likewise recognised obstetric violence in its jurisprudence.

Women and girls of African descent may experience multiple and intersecting discrimination on grounds including race, sex and gender, nationality and migration status. Two studies from 2025 and 2026 on Sub-Saharan African migrant women or racialized migrant women in maternal care identified accessibility problems, absence of interpreters, delayed diagnoses and care, inadequate pain management, lack of emotional support, disrespect, abuse and differential care, as well as loss of agency and exclusion from decisions.

CEDAW’s General Recommendation No. 35 recognizes that gender-based violence against women is a form of discrimination, and that women facing intersecting forms of discrimination can be particularly affected by such violence and encounter additional barriers to protection and justice.

Taken together, these findings give us an important message: We cannot separate gender equality from racial equality. And we cannot separate either of them from the right to health.

We have identified the issues- the healthcare system should be accessible without discrimination, safe, respectful, women should be listened to when they describe their pain, their informed consent should be respected, and race, ethnicity, migration status or other aspects of identity should not affect negatively how their symptoms, choices and dignity are treated.

Today, we would like to possibly take it a step further to develop practical recommendations as to how to move to ensure that healthcare professionals are equipped to recognise racial and gender bias, equipped for trauma-informed and anti-discriminatory care, equipped to listening seriously to the experiences of racialised women. And are we all ensuring that racialized women participate in designing the policies and health systems that affect them. We also need to reflect further today on how we realize accountability and effective remedies when rights are violated.

To close the circle, health care must never reproduce discrimination or violence. It must be part of overcoming them.

We thank you very much for being here, for bringing your expertise and your experiences into this space and I wish us all an open and productive discussion.