At the launch of Secretary General’s report titled ‘Ensuring and Strengthening Access to Justice for All Women and Girls’: Sarah Hendriks – Director of UN Women’s Policy, Programme and Intergovernmental Division emphasized ‘no country in the world has achieved full legal equality between women and men. This is the reason why Justice Systems must be in a workable integrated systems to navigate the endless bureaucratic complexities where in many cases act as prime reason for many to give up before perusing justice. Justice systems are summarized in 6 priorities:
1. Justice systems must be legally equal without exception.
2. Justice systems must work together in a team (in the criminal context).
3. Justice must be preventative that means it must work in a preventive mode to stop violence before it escalates.
4. Justice must be financed as a public good.
5. Justice reform needs to be shaped by women that to reflect women’s need.
6. Justice systems need to be ready for digital age.
Sarah Hendriks – UN Women spokesperson exposed the current facts:
- No country in the world has achieved full legal equality between women and men. More than half of world’s countries do not actually define rape by law on the basis of consent. Nearly three quarters, specifically, 74% of world’s countries actually still allow child marriage by law that means to allow girls to be married as children. The fact says in 44 % of world’s countries, the law does not mandate equal pay for work.
- Women and girls rights’violations are indeed accelerating in a growing culture of impunity. This spans courts, as well online spaces, conflict, and also increasingly enabled by backlash against gender equality. Just in the past two years victims to conflict related sexual violence has risen to 87%. Especially now, at digital era sets on live mode. Online spaces, digital technologies are being weaponized, through harassment, through abuse, through deep fakes that silence women, that force women to deplatform, and far too often, perpetrators face absolutely no consequences. This fact confirms that justice system fails half the world’s population cannot claim to uphold justice at all.
- Actually, justice systems can evolve. They can transform, and certainly when they do, the impact is indeed transformative. Access to justice is one of those powerful forces for advancing equality in the lives of women and girls: when laws change, we see those changes very practically, very concretely. Since 1970, family law reforms have led to more than 600 million women accessing new economic opportunities, all because the law was reformed on the family.
We join the Secretary General in calling for that violence in Middle East to stop for the sake of every woman and every girl whose lives, whose safety and whose futures are really now at risk.
Related Link:
Justice for All Women and Girls – UN Women Press Conference| United Nations
