Trump’s former Special Representative for Global Women’s Health and a long-time anti-abortion activist, Valerie Huber, argued recently in an opinion piece in The Hill that an international anti-abortion agreement she spearheaded is one of the “most underused diplomatic assets in America’s current foreign policy toolkit.”
Huber, now CEO of The Institute for Women’s Health, served during the first Trump administration, where she was instrumental in the creation of the October 2022 Geneva Consensus Declaration (GCD). Signed by 41 countries, the GCD is a nonbinding international agreement with the stated goal of promoting better “health for women, the preservation of human life, strengthening of the family as the foundational unit of society, and protecting every nation’s national sovereignty in global politics.”
While the GCD presents itself as promoting the “full enjoyment of all human rights” and the “highest attainable standards of health for women,” it is actually an attack on the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), women’s access to abortion and reproductive healthcare, and the rights of the LGBTQ+ community. It was the policy outcome of Trump’s first White House’s move to take its far-right agenda against women’s reproductive health rights and the LGBTQ+ community global.
Huber’s piece explicitly outlines an effort to use the GCD as a means of rejecting “efforts to establish abortion as a universal right through treaty interpretation and multilateral pressure.”
In total, 34 countries initially joined the agreement in 2020. Since then, nine additional governments have joined the GCD, which Trump’s second administration revived as a key foreign policy tool. More than half of the signatories to the declaration are considered authoritarian regimes that regularly violate the rights of their citizens, according to Freedom House, an NGO that focuses on assessing the health of global democracy. Among these regimes are Burkina Faso, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, and Zambia.
Only four European countries signed onto the agreement: Belarus, Hungary, Georgia, and Russia. All are considered either “partly free” or “not free” by Freedom House, although the new Hungarian government will likely alter that label.
The 2020 signing event was hosted by Alex Azar, then Secretary of Health and Human Services, who said the GCD would address what he described as a “disturbing trend” in which “rich nations and U.N. agencies beholden to them are wrongly asserting abortion as a universal human right. These efforts pressure countries to institute progressive abortion law.”
Then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attended the virtual signing ceremony, claiming the GCD promoted women’s health and “defends the unborn and reiterates the vital importance of the family.”
Earlier in 2020, a panel on “Unalienable Rights” commissioned by Pompeo made suggestions on how to narrow the scope of the types of human rights the U.S. prioritized in line with the “nation’s founding principles.” The panel’s report said it could not find a consensus on the application of human rights with regard to “abortion, affirmative action, and capital punishment, to name a few.”
Developed with the full support of the White House, Vice President Mike Pence threw his support behind the GCD. In December 2020, during an anti-abortion event hosted by Pence, he announced that four more countries were signing onto the agreement. When Huber and other anti-abortion advocates protested the U.S. leaving the agreement under Biden’s administration in 2021, Pence took to the social media platform X to call the GCD one of the “crowning achievements” of the Trump administration.
“It was my privilege to serve as Vice President in the most pro-life administration in history,” he wrote in the July 2023 post.
Despite the U.S. withdrawal from the GCD under President Joe Biden—during which the hosting of the GCD Secretariat fell to Brazil under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in 2021 and then Viktor Orbán’s Hungary in 2023—Trump’s current Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the Trump administration was rejoining the declaration in January 2025.
The GCD seeks to create an institutionalized opposition and alternative framework to the global UDHR, specifically attacking the principles that underpin the recognition of access to abortion and same-sex marriage as human rights under international law.
A Setback for Global Human Rights
The GCD makes overtures that its purpose is to preserve the “human rights of women” as an “inalienable, integral, and indivisible part of all human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Through the lens of preserving national sovereignty, it contends legislation related to abortion “can only be determined at the national or local level according to the national legislative process.”
The GCD selectively cites sections of U.N. declarations to undermine the UDHR and emphasizes or reaffirms aspects of the documents that serve its purposes. These include the “Constitution of the World Health Organization,” the “International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights” (ICCPR), as well as the UDHR itself.
Using language from the ICCPR, the GCD emphasized “the equal right of men and women to the enjoyment of all civil and political rights,” and from the 1996 U.N. International Conference on Population and Development, it picked up promoting the “equal sharing of responsibilities for the family by men and women and a harmonious partnership between them are critical to their well-being and that of their families.”
The GCD document also states that “there is no international right to abortion,” and though it does not specifically mention same-sex unions, asserts that the family is “foundational to society and as a source of health, support, and care.”
As part of a coordinated campaign by influential members of the American and international far right, the GCD serves as a framework for opposition to abortion and to what has been a growing international legal consensus supporting reproductive health access.
Links to Project 2025
The Heritage Foundation, a Christian nationalist think tank and advocacy organization whose members and allies are deeply embedded within the Trump administration, sees the GCD as one of many tools to enact their agenda within the U.S. and abroad.
Heritage, together with a coalition of other organizations, laid out its blueprint for the country under the Trump administration in its Project 2025 920-page document titled “Mandate For Leadership.” Project 2025 details its plan to reform American democracy into a system rooted in Christian nationalism, a political movement that asserts the United States should be governed according to a far-right interpretation of Christian doctrine. The authors of the project argue that the nation’s survival depends on restoring religious authority over public life and replacing secular governance with policies grounded in their interpretation of biblical values.
Among its many prescriptions for the country, Project 2025 calls for a fundamental reshaping of U.S. foreign policy. The report outlines a shift away from diplomatic priorities such as promoting democracy, supporting human rights, and funding humanitarian assistance, replacing them with initiatives designed to advance opposition to abortion rights, undermine LGBTQ+ equality, and equality efforts generally for women and girls, all according to a Christian nationalist interpretation.
While the Heritage Foundation did not play a direct role in the creation of the GCD, the declaration is mentioned multiple times in the plan, to which Valerie Huber is a contributor. The GCD codifies many of the organization’s positions in regard to promoting criminalizing abortion on the international stage through diplomacy. The GCD is a key mechanism in this goal.
Only Four European Countries Signed the Geneva Consensus Declaration
Today, the declaration has 41 signatories, most of them from Africa, including Egypt, Uganda, and Sudan. It also unites several Asian and Middle Eastern countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, and three Latin American states: Guatemala, Haiti, and Paraguay.
More than half of the original signatories to the declaration are authoritarian regimes, including Bahrain, Belarus, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Brazil and Colombia have since exited the GCD after elections resulted in changes in both countries’ governments. With the ouster of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in that country’s 2026 elections and the rise of the TISZA party and its leader, Péter Magyar, Hungary’s future with the GCD is not yet clear.
Before the 2026 election, Hungary was one of Trump’s most stalwart allies on the international stage, pushing a far-right agenda domestically as well as within the European Union. Orbán and his parliament voted in 2025 to ban Pride events, threatening attendees with fines for their participation. This even extended to the mayor of Budapest, who was one of thousands of demonstrators who attended the capital city’s Pride parade last year in defiance of the ban.
Magyar has indicated he supports freedom of assembly and protest around LGBTQ+ issues. He has also said he considers the issue of abortion settled within Hungary and that he does not intend to change the current regulations.
Besides Hungary, the U.S. stands alongside three European governments promoting a Christian nationalist agenda — and states governed by conservative interpretations of Islam— through the GCD. Philosopher Paul B. Preciado highlights the paradox of this coalition, which unites Christian nationalist regimes with those enforcing restrictive interpretations of Islamic law. As Preciado notes, many of these countries are “fighting among themselves in other respects.” Yet, according to Preciado, the GCD reveals a common agenda: “The expropriation of women’s reproductive systems, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia.”
In 2021, the UN Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls warned of the social setbacks driven by the GCD network, describing it as “an example of the harmful mobilization of States with conservative and anti-women’s rights agendas to undermine the well-established and globally recognized human rights of women and girls.”
Since its adoption, several signatory states have moved to restrict access to abortion and dismantle protections for LGBTQ+ people, undermining human rights in line with the GCD and the principles set out in Project 2025.
Global Consequences of the GCD
Since the signing of the GCD, several of the governments involved have increased surveillance of pregnancies and contraceptive interventions. There have already been concerns that the Trump administration used aid negotiations to obtain “controversial concessions on unrelated policies.”
Indicative of this strategy, Zimbabwe halted aid talks with the U.S. after its government determined “lop-sided” negotiations were a risk to the country’s sovereignty. The pullout was followed by an announcement that the U.S. would be “winding down our health assistance.”
In April 2026, it was reported that the Trump administration was breaking with precedent and not disclosing the full details of 28 deals with foreign governments related to aid intended to help combat disease, predominately in Africa. This included Zambia, where access to aid became a pressure point over securing mining access to critical minerals.
This, combined with the White House’s support for the GCD, suggests that aid or agreements could be conditional on the acceptance of non-evidence-based approaches to women’s health and human rights.
One important example of the GCD in action is Kenya’s Electronic Community Health Information System, or eCHIS, a Project 2025-aligned effort that prioritizes the use of digital monitoring to ensure that foreign aid is spent in alignment with its far-right agenda of restricting women’s rights.
By January 2026, eCHIS had achieved 75 percent household coverage, functioning as a real-time compliance dashboard for the State Department. Through the Afya Nyumbani (Health at Home) program, Kenya’s 107,000 Community Health Promoters (CHPs) act as the state’s digital eyes. Equipped with smartphones, these workers track every pregnancy, birth, and contraceptive intervention at the village level.
This data is then shared with Washington to prove that Kenya is strictly following the GCD and other agreements. Funding for the program’s salaries and smartphones is now directly conditioned on this data-sharing. If the eCHIS logs show a rise in “non-aligned” services, such as inclusive reproductive care or LGBTQ+ support, the U.S. can trigger immediate financial penalties, effectively defunding clinics. The eCHIS system does not just record data; it directs behavior. The software uses automated “nudges” and “decision support” to guide patient visits. In the 2026 version of the software, these algorithms have been reformatted to prioritize the “natural family” and “pro-life” pillars of the GCD.
Under this system, a clinic’s performance is no longer measured solely by patient recovery or disease prevention. Instead, their success is graded by “compliance with moral health standards.” These values are hard-coded into the smartphones used in every Kenyan village, ensuring that even if a citizen’s rights are protected on paper by the 2010 Constitution, the actual system of care is programmed to deny them.
With Project 2025, the U.S. has institutionalized the GCD as the standard for its alliances, demanding that partners uncouple from international human rights standards that violate its anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ provisions. The Kenyan government has actively undermined its own institutions to accommodate the U.S., prioritizing ideological loyalty over constitutional mandates. This transition from democratic conditionality to ideological fealty ensures that as long as the Kenyan government remains loyal to the GCD, the U.S. will frame its domestic crackdowns not as democratic failures, but as the legitimate exercise of national sovereignty.
Far Right Reshaping Human Rights Norms
Though non-binding, the Geneva Consensus Declaration has become a powerful instrument for reshaping international human rights norms surrounding reproductive rights, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ protections.
The GCD has been reinforced by the Trump administration as part of a broader global effort against reproductive rights and definitions of family outside of the “traditional” marriage between men and women. It demonstrates the willingness to work with some of the most authoritarian regimes to promote these values globally. This has given the U.S. government a degree of complicity in the increasing surveillance of women and their reproductive health, while weakening the international legal consensus supporting abortion and LGBTQ+ protections.
By using the frame of defending national sovereignty, the GCD provides a framework for the circumvention of international agreements and the already fraught exercise of enacting and implementing human rights law.
