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On June 22–24, 2026, the 56th Regular Session of the General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) was held in Panama, adopting the Panama Declaration entitled “Firm Multilateralism in Defense of Democracy: Hemispheric Security and Stability in the American States.”

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The Assembly’s final documents contain no language on “sexual and reproductive health and rights” or “gender-based violence” — for the first time in several years, these issues were not the subject of negotiations.

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The delegations of Argentina, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador, and the United States, along with the new governments of Costa Rica, Chile, and Peru, supported the exclusion of this language.

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Mexico and Brazil assessed the absence of this language as a departure from the terminology used to date.

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Similar changes were also noted in a document adopted in June 2026 by the Inter-American Commission of Women, a subsidiary body of the OAS.

The course of the Assembly

The 56th Regular Session of the General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) was held in Panama under a theme referring to the bicentennial of the Amphictyonic Congress convened in 1826 by Simón Bolívar. The Assembly adopted the Panama Declaration, which addresses democracy, the rule of law, multilateral cooperation, and regional security. However, the adoption of a declaration concerning the rights of people of African descent was postponed due to disagreements over language referring to abortion, gender identity, and “sexual diversity.”

Terminology concerning “sexual and reproductive health and rights” and “gender-based violence” had in previous years been a permanent feature of documents adopted by the OAS. States disagreeing with this approach had until now limited themselves to filing interpretative reservations to the adopted texts, which did not prevent the subsequent use of this language in the organization’s normative and programmatic activities. In this year’s negotiations, by contrast, this language was not included in any of the draft documents, including, among others, the resolution on international assistance for Haiti.

A shift in the political landscape of the region

This change is being linked to political transformations in several Latin American countries, where governments with a political profile different from their predecessors have come to power in recent months. At the two previous sessions of the General Assembly, the states in favor of retaining the existing terminology had proposed continuation resolutions, allowing existing programs to be maintained without renegotiating their content.

The delegations of Mexico and Brazil described the omission of the disputed language as a departure from the terminology adopted to date within the organization. Representatives of non-governmental organizations involved in these issues, quoted in reports from the session, point to growing cooperation among the states in favor of excluding the disputed language, while noting that the coordination of this position has not yet fully taken shape.

Summary

The outcome of the 56th General Assembly of the OAS represents a noticeable change compared with the organization’s practice to date, under which terminology referring to “sexual and reproductive health and rights” was a permanent feature of successive documents. For the first time in a long while, the states disagreeing with this approach did not limit themselves to interpretative reservations, but brought about the exclusion of this language from the content of the adopted documents.

The durability of this change will depend on the further course of negotiations in other OAS bodies, including within reporting mechanisms and sectoral programs, where this terminology has so far been introduced also outside the formal sessions of the General Assembly.

“The example of this year’s OAS General Assembly shows that expressions such as ‘reproductive health’ function in the documents of international organizations regardless of whether individual states agree with them — as long as they appear in the text even once. Interpretative reservations, which for years were the only tool available to states opposing such terminology, did not prevent its continued use in institutional practice.

For this reason, the strategy applied in Panama — that is, excluding the disputed language already at the stage of negotiating the text, rather than only after its adoption — seems worth noting as a precedent that could also be applied in other international forums, including within the European Union and the United Nations, where similar disputes over definitions and terminology remain unresolved,” comments Julia Książek of the Center for International Law of the Ordo Iuris Institute.

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Source of cover photo: iStock