by Stefano Vaccara
NEW YORK (USA) (ITALPRESS) – Women’s rights are globally retracting and judicial systems often fail to guarantee protection and justice to victims of violence. It is the alarm launched by a new UN Women report, the United Nations Gender Equality Agency, presented in New York. The report, entitled “Ensuring and Strengthening Access to Justice for All Women and Girls”, analyses how in many countries laws and judicial systems cannot guarantee full protection to women and girls.
“While the world crosses a phase of democratic backwardness, increased conflicts, economic pressure and narrowing of civic space, we witness an increasingly organized push against gender equality and a regression of women’s rights,” said Sarah Hendriks, Director of the Policy, Programme and Intergovernmental Division of UN Women, during a briefing with journalists at the Glass Palace. “The justice systems are not separated from these pressures: they often reflect them,” he added.
According to the report, women in the world have on average only 64% of men’s legal rights and encounter obstacles in access to justice in almost 70% of the countries analysed. Among the causes identified there are discriminatory laws, social norms rooted, gaps in the application of laws and the impact of armed conflicts. The document warns that women and girls are often abandoned by the systems that should protect them, exposing them to violence, injustice and impunity.
During the press conference, Italpress asked whether in the report there was a reference to the case Jeffrey Epstein and the role of the U.S. Department of Justice in the last thirty years, remembering how hundreds of women – many of whom underages – were busy and abused while for years accusations did not lead to effective judicial action. Hendriks responded that the report does not analyse specific cases or individual countries, but addresses the wider problem of impunity and functioning of judicial systems.
“The report focuses on breaking the rule of law and spreading impunity,” he explained. “When justice systems are not supported in protecting women and girls victims of violence, they are the ones who pay the highest price.” According to UN Women’s executive, when justice does not work the consequences are deep: “When justice systems fail, survivors are further silenced, the authors of violence act without consequences and inequality and fear are strengthened in society.”.
In a follow-up we asked if you had a council for the Attorney General and the U.S. Department of Justice on how to better protect women today. “I am not a general prosecutor,” Hendriks replied, but stressing that the fundamental principle is that women and girls must be heard and believed, and that violence against them must be recognized as a violation of human rights.
“Every case must be investigated, every author must be called to respond to his own actions and justice must be guaranteed to women and girls everywhere,” he said, underlining: “anywhere, in every country in the world.” Soon after, another journalist explicitly asked whether, in the light of the report, the American judicial system failed to protect women. Hendriks has avoided a direct judgment, claiming that the central question is whether women can actually seek justice and whether that justice is then guaranteed.
“We can all observe, both by looking at news and listening to women’s rights organizations, to what extent justice is really guaranteed, here as in the rest of the world,” he concluded.
-Photo xo9/Italpress-
(ITALPRESS).
