Sexual Justice and the Future of Sexual Rights: A Call to Action

This position paper introduces sexual justice as a transformative framework for addressing the systemic inequalities and inequities that shape global and local experiences of sexuality, health, and rights. While international frameworks have recognized sexual and reproductive rights as fundamental human rights, they remain unevenly realized, particularly for those who live at the intersections of socio-economic injustice, structural violence, and oppression, moralistic control, colonial legacies, and authoritarian retrenchments. Sexual justice challenges us to move beyond necessary individual and collective protections toward structural transformation. It reframes our understanding of what it means to live with dignity, autonomy, full citizenship, and pleasure. In doing so, it interrogates the legal, political, medical, economic, and cultural systems that determine whose lives are deemed legitimate, whose desires are punished, and whose knowledge is erased. Grounded in the lived experience of movements that have long resisted oppression and marginalization, drawing on theoretical and historical perspectives, intersectional analysis, global solidarity and activist knowledge, sexual justice offers a shared foundation for reflection and action, serving as both a political compass and a call to build just, inclusive, and participatory systems across health, education, law, civil society, and international cooperation. Sexual justice requires equity as a core condition for access, not only to healthcare, information, and education, but also in the distribution of power and resources. It insists on reparations and redress for past and ongoing harms, and centers on those most affected in defining the path forward. This paper offers strategic recommendations for governments, institutions, social movements and sexual health professionals to operationalize sexual justice through legislative reform, institutional accountability, resource redistribution, and participatory practice. Endorsed by The World Association for Sexual Health (WAS), this framework builds upon the Porto Proclamation: Advancing a Global Agenda for Sexual Health, Rights, and Justice (2026), the WAS Declaration on Sexual Justice (2025), the WAS Declaration on Sexual Pleasure (2019), and the WAS Declaration on Sexual Rights (2014).