The treatment of a 22-year-old pregnant woman in El Salvador who was repeatedly denied potentially life-saving medical care due to the country's absolute abortion ban has caused worldwide outrage.

The woman, known as Beatriz, has lupus and kidney disease, and the foetus she carried, missing parts of its skull and brain, posed a real threat to her life. Yet Beatriz endured a 14-week wait as the Salvadoran supreme court repeatedly denied her permission to end her pregnancy, even though it could save her life. Only under intense pressure from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights did Salvadoran officials find a legal loophole enabling Beatriz's doctors to perform an emergency caesarean, after which the foetus died.

Beatriz's plight is not uncommon under El Salvador's harsh abortion ban, which does not allow women to end pregnancies even in cases of rape, incest and foetal abnormalitiy, or when their health or lives are at risk. Women who arrive at hospitals haemorrhaging are often accused of attempting an abortion, and the judicial system is quick to sentence women to up to 30 years in prison for crimes they haven't committed.

International law has long established that denying reproductive health services to women in life-threatening situations is a violation of human rights. If that's the case, then why do countries such as El Salvador continue to get away with it?

In large part, it's because there is insufficient accountability for countries that deny women their fundamental rights.

On Sunday, delegates from the UN, governments and civil society will gather in The Hague for a four-day conference to try to make progress on this problem. The event is part of a comprehensive process taking place at the UN ahead of the 20th anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in September 2014. The aim is to review and assess progress towards goals aimed at ensuring women's reproductive rights.

When the ICPD convened in Cairo in 1994, it was the first time countries came together to affirm that reproductive rights are human rights, and that states have an obligation to respect, protect and fulfil those rights for all citizens. These 179 countries committed to ensuring women's reproductive autonomy and to providing women the resources they need to choose the number and spacing of their children.

Almost 20 years later, 222 million women who want to avoid pregnancy cannot obtain modern contraception or are relying on traditional techniques such as withdrawal or calendar-based methods. In 29 countries, laws criminalising abortion do not have any explicit exceptions, including when the woman's life is at risk.

These laws and practices perpetuate unwanted and unplanned pregnancies, which often result in devastating consequences for women's health and prospects, and can endanger their lives. Often, women realise they have little recourse and few ways to hold states accountable over their commitments.

Even though the Cairo conference was a catalyst for change in government policies on reproductive rights and women's rights, states are still falling short on their commitments and women are still fighting for their fundamental rights.

Access to reproductive health services is far too often relegated to discussions on public health, development or population dynamics, without taking into account how these policies affect women's rights. There needs to be a serious discussion about how the human rights of women and girls are integrated into the development of policies surrounding not only sexual and reproductive health, but also population and development.

States should seize this opportunity to ensure that gaps in implementing the ICPD's outcomes are recognised, particularly those relating to women's reproductive rights. We need to establish accountability measures for the commitments states have made both at ICPD and under international human rights law.

More than a decade ago, when El Salvador banned all abortions, I wrote a report on the human rights violations that resulted. Although the Cairo conference brought about stronger protections for women, there has been no real accountability for governments that shirk their obligations, such as El Salvador.

As the world prepares to review progress on the Cairo agenda and set the stage for the new development agenda in 2015, when the millennium development goals expire, we must ensure that human rights are non-negotiable so that women are able to live their lives with dignity, respect and equality.

• Luisa Cabal is vice-president of programmes at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which fights to ensure that reproductive rights are treated as fundamental human rights