Last year, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Reproductive Rights, Anand Grover, broke major ground by demanding the removal, without delay, of all barriers with regard to reproductive access globally, as well as granted access to contraception. In his report, Grover declared denial of access to abortion as discriminatory. Coupled with the new report from the Special Rapporteur on Torture, women’s rights activists worldwide are cheering.

In his report, Méndez, too, holds that denial of reproductive justice is discrimination on the basis of gender and denial of that right can cause “tremendous and lasting physical and emotional suffering” to women. According to the Special Rapporteur’s report, such violations include:

Abusive treatment and humiliation in institutional settings; involuntary sterilization; denial of legally available health services such as abortion and post-abortion care; forced abortions and sterilizations; female genital mutilation; violations of medical secrecy and confidentiality in health-care settings, such as denunciations of women by medical personnel when evidence of illegal abortion is found; and the practice of attempting to obtain confessions as a condition of potentially life-saving medical treatment after abortion.

The importance of the report cannot be understated. In the past, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International have called upon the United Nations Committee against Torture to intervene in countries such as Nicaragua where a total ban on abortion and criminalization of doctors who provide the procedure and women and girls who obtain them has been instated. Nicaragua’s penal code goes so far as to penalize women who undergo miscarriages as it is often hard to discern between a miscarriage (or spontaneous abortion) and a selective abortion. Indeed, Amnesty reports that doctors and nurses are hesitant to treat extremely ill patients for fear that they may in turn harm the fetus and find themselves facing jail time. This new UN report, specifically referring to denial by the state of the right to safely terminate an unwanted pregnancy as torture or ill treatment, is promising for moving women’s rights forward globally and in hopefully reversing such dangerous bans as in Nicaragua.

More: UN Report Classifies Lack of Access to Abortion as ‘Torture’