For more than 25 years, Goedele Liekens has worked to make sexual and reproductive health and rights a reality, first as a UNFPA Goodwill Ambassador and today as a Belgian senator. Elected to the Belgian Chamber of Representatives in 2019, she set out to turn that commitment into law. She co-sponsored the bill that abolished the statute of limitations for serious sexual offences against minors, giving survivors the time they often need to come forward, and contributed to the 2022 reform of sexual criminal law with a bill on sexual consent. When Turkey and Poland moved to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, she authored the Chamber's 2021 resolution defending it. Her conviction that women must decide over their own bodies also shaped the 2023 resolution she co-authored, calling on Belgium to champion SRHR, from contraception to safe and legal abortion, in its foreign policy.
As Alphea Vice-President since 2024, after five years on its Executive Committee, she carries this commitment beyond Belgium. In 2022, as testimonies of sexual violence emerged from the war in Ukraine, she co-sponsored a Belgian resolution calling for an international criminal investigation, then joined an Alphea delegation to refugee shelters in Poland and Ukraine to hear survivors first-hand. At the 2026 UN Commission on the Status of Women, she warned that growing divisions between countries show how fragile progress on women's rights remains.