Ana Güezmes, Director of the Division of Gender Affairs of ECLAC, participated in a panel that addressed the right to care from regional and human rights perspectives, in dialogue with normative advances and the commitments adopted by the States of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Tuesday, January 27, 2026. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), represented by Ana Güezmes García, Director of the Division of Gender Affairs (DAG), participated in the Inter-American Seminar on Human Rights – First Edition: Human Rights and Their Challenges. Different Perspectives, organized by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, at its headquarters in San José, Costa Rica.

The opening session featured remarks by the President of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Judge Rodrigo Mudrovitsch, who highlighted the importance of inter-American dialogue to strengthen the protection of human rights and to respond to the structural challenges facing the region.

In this context, Ana Güezmes, Director of the Division of Gender Affairs of ECLAC, participated in the first panel of the Seminar, entitled The right to care and its challenges for Latin America, moderated by Judge Diego Moreno Rodríguez of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

The panel also included the participation of Justice Morgana de Almeida Richa, of the Superior Labour Court of Brazil; Gabriela Mata Marín, Programme Coordinator of UN Women in Costa Rica; and Justice Loretta Ortiz Ahlf, of the Supreme Court of Justice of the United Mexican States. The discussion addressed the right to care from legal, institutional, and public policy perspectives.

During her remarks, Ana Güezmes underscored that care must be understood as a necessity, a human right, a global public good, and a form of work that is key to energizing the economy, in a context marked by multiple, intertwined crises that deepen historical inequalities in Latin America and the Caribbean. In this regard, she warned that the sustained increase in care demands, associated with population aging, demographic transformations, epidemiological trends, and the effects of climate change, exceeds the current capacity of people, services, and infrastructure to respond to these needs, a situation widely documented by ECLAC as the care crisis.

Ana Güezmes also emphasized that the proposal of a care society that Latin America and the Caribbean brings to the world represents a new paradigm for sustainable development, equality, and peace, one that prioritizes the sustainability of life and the care of people and the planet. This approach requires comprehensive care policies and systems based on social and gender co-responsibility, employment generation, and decent work, as well as recognition of both paid and unpaid work that sustains life and the economy.

The Director stressed that the right to care entails guaranteeing its three dimensions: caring, being cared for, and exercising self-care. Its recognition requires articulation across social, environmental, and economic policies, strengthening public governance, and advancing toward comprehensive care systems that respond to the needs of people throughout the life cycle and of those who provide care, most of whom are women.

In this context, Ana Güezmes highlighted the role of the inter-American system and noted that Advisory Opinion No. 31 of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the first international tribunal to recognize the right to care as an autonomous human right indispensable for the sustainability of life and a condition for the effective exercise of other rights, establishes principles such as co-responsibility, equality, and non-discrimination, as well as clear obligations for States. She also noted that recognition of care as a human right has evolved significantly within the international human rights framework, and that Latin America and the Caribbean has been key to this progress over the 50 years of the Regional Conference on Women, particularly following the Brasilia Consensus of 2010, which specifically recognized the right to care in an intergovernmental agreement, and its further development in the Buenos Aires Commitment of 2022 to further deepen its recognition as an autonomous human right in the Tlatelolco Commitment in 2025.

Ana Güezmes underlined that this legal recognition directly dialogues with and contributes to the Tlatelolco Commitment, approved at the XVI Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, which incorporates this advisory opinion and establishes a decade of action to accelerate the achievement of substantive gender equality and the care society, through agreements on normative frameworks, institutional arrangements, financing, participation, strengthening of State capacities, and information systems, monitoring, and accountability.

Finally, the Director stated that advancing in the guarantee of the right to care constitutes a key condition for addressing development traps in the region, reducing gender inequalities, and promoting sustainable development centered on the sustainability of life and the care of people and the planet.

The Inter-American Seminar on Human Rights brought together representatives of high courts, international organizations, academia, and civil society, and was broadcast live through the social media channels of the Court and its Corte IDH TV channel.