Belgrade – The Women’s Court for the former Yugoslavia should start working next year. It will be a space for women’s voices and their testimony of what they survived during the war, but also in peace. The organization of the Women’s Court should encourage women to testify about the violence in the private and public spheres, about all kinds of structural injustice and social and health vulnerability, abuse of religion for political purposes…
Staša Zajović, president of the Women in Black movement, explains to Danas that the Women’s Court is organized because institutional legal system does not meet the justice on an international, and even less on the national level, and that this is especially true when it comes to countries of the former Yugoslavia, in which political elites invest huge efforts to circumvent or sacrifice justice for political interest and maintaining power.
– Therefore civil society takes responsibility for justice by creating a different concept of justice, by creating alternative mechanisms of justice from a feminist point of view. But feminist approach to justice does not constitute a denial of the existing models of transitional justice, but, among other things, involves the inclusion of gender dimension in the theory and practice of justice, then the visibility and valuation of women’s resistance to patriarchy – sexism, nationalism and militarism. Also, this approach to justice means and visibility of women’s contribution to the process of justice, or the important role of feminist activists in non-violent resistance to war and in the process of building trust and peace – says Zajović.
She adds that women through the Women’s Court became the subjects of justice, and so promote the establishment of different judicial practices and influence the institutional legal system. As she pointed out, this Court encourages the strengthening of networks of mutual support and solidarity to create a strong autonomous women’s movement and different – feminist concept of responsibility, care and safety, and all in order to build a just peace.
– Our aim is to strengthen the global feminist- pacifist alliances and coalitions, towards punishability of violence and crime, influencing international institutions of justice in order to make the documents and resolutions based on the everyday experience of injustice against women and those who have little social, economic and political power – conclude interlocutors of Danas.
Who makes the Women’s Court?
Regional Organizing Committee of the Women’s Court consists of organizations from Bosnia and Herzegovina – Mothers of Srebrenica and Zepa, Women’s Forum and the CURE Foundation, then Montenegrin NGO Anima, the Croatian Centre for Women’s Studies, the Centre for Women War Victims – ROSA and Kosovo Women’s Network. Also, in the Organizing Committee is and the Macedonian Gender Equality Council, Women’s Lobby of Slovenia and Belgrade Centre for Women’s Studies and Women in Black.
The Women’s Court is dealing with what issues?
– War crimes against women: forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, trafficking, sexual crimes (rape in war, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy, sexual slavery).
– Militaristic violence against women and the whole population: all kinds of weapons (conventional and nuclear), sex industry around military brothels, torture, economic blockade against civilians.
– The violence and crimes against women in the name of customary law and religion: female genital mutilation, stoning of women, the imposition of dress code (dress code), discrimination against women in terms of property relations, arranged marriages, feticide – the killing of female fetuses.
– Economic violence, violation of labour rights of women: exploitation in the workplace, employment discrimination, the feminization of poverty.
– Family violence against women: physical, psychological and sexual violence.
– Political violence: the illegal arrest, torture, kidnapping, persecution, harassment, house arrest.
– Abuse of women’s reproductive rights: the denial of contraception and the prohibition of abortion, forced sterilization, abuse of bodies for medical experiments.
– The resistance of women: against all forms of patriarchal injustice in private and public spheres.
