In Santo Domingo, a broad coalition of Dominican civil society organizations—encompassing social, feminist, community, labor, human rights, and even religious groups—is calling on the national government to uphold its long-held 2019 stance and refuse to join the Geneva Consensus Declaration (GCD), as pressure from the former U.S. Donald Trump administration persists to push the country into signing the anti-abortion pact.
Launched in October 2020 by the United States and a bloc of supporting nations, the GCD is a politically driven international declaration structured around three core pillars. First, it explicitly rejects the existence of a universally recognized international right to abortion, holding that no country is bound by international law to fund or expand access to abortion services. Second, it emphasizes national sovereignty, claiming that every nation has the right to shape its own domestic laws, health initiatives and social policies without outside interference. Third, it centers the traditional family unit as the fundamental foundation of society and the primary source of care, welfare and support for community members.
Despite the GCD being framed as a non-binding political statement rather than a legally enforceable international treaty, the Dominican coalition has laid out a series of grave concerns over the potential far-reaching impacts of the country joining the declaration. In an official public manifesto signed by the Coalition for Women’s Rights and Life and dozens of allied groups across the nation, the organizations argue that the GCD’s core principles directly conflict with the Dominican Constitution, existing national legislation, and the country’s standing commitments to global human rights, gender equality, public health, and the rights of women and children.
Civil society leaders warn that even without legal force, the GCD’s framing could gradually reshape domestic public policy, regulatory frameworks, government decision-making, national budget allocations, and the terms of international cooperation agreements that the Dominican government enters into. One key point of contention is the declaration’s potential to disrupt the constitutional separation of powers, by pushing to restrict health policy-related decisions exclusively to legislative bodies, overriding the constitutional authority granted to other branches of government. The coalition stresses that each branch of government must retain its constitutionally assigned powers independent of external political pressure.
The groups also highlight that joining the GCD would erode existing international human rights protections for Dominican women, girls and adolescents, weakening commitments enshrined in landmark global and regional frameworks including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence Against Women (Belém do Pará Convention).
Beyond reproductive rights, the coalition rejects the GCD’s imposition of a single, narrow definition of family, arguing that all family structures deserve equal state protection rooted in principles of human dignity, gender equality, non-discrimination, and the best interests of children.
In their formal appeal to the Dominican government, the coalition is demanding four clear actions: that officials decline to sign the declaration, that they uphold the national Constitution and the separation of powers, that they preserve the country’s existing international human rights commitments, and that they make public any ongoing negotiations, preliminary agreements or conditions linked to a potential GCD accession.