04.09.2015.
Women’s Court: Preliminary Decisions and Recommendations
The first women’s court in the territory of Europe, was held in Sarajevo from 7th to 10th May 2015, organized by 10 women’s groups from the former Yugoslavia (Mothers Movement of the enclaves of Srebrenica and Žepa and the Foundation Cure, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Hercegovina; Center for Women and Peace Studies Anima, Kotor, Montenegro; Center for Women Victims of War and Center for Women Studies, Zagreb, Croatia; Kosovo Women Network, Pristina, Kosovo; Council for Gender Equality, Skopje, Macedonia; Women’s Lobby, Ljubljana, Slovenia; Center for Women Studies and Women in Black, Belgrade, Serbia).
Women in Black published:
Preliminary Decisions and Recommendations
WOMEN’S COURT: FEMINIST JUSTICE
I. FEMINIST JUSTICE
Women have created the Women’s Court in order to develop a vision of feminist justice which transcends state borders and strives for justice, rather than fulfilling mere legal obligations. You (women witnesses) are the leading subjects of the Women’s Court. You have been invisible for too long. In formal legal proceedings you are treated as victims or as providing legal evidence, but in the Women’s Court you decided to speak loudly and under your own names, and in your own way. You became testifiers about crimes and violence, whose voices and experience could no longer be ignored. You have become an authentic part of history. Without you, the Women’s Court would not have happened. We honor your courage and honesty, and we thank you for your trust.
We also have great appreciation for the efforts of the organizers, the expert witnesses, as well as activists from the Balkans region and the whole world, who have made this Women’s Court possible.
After two days of listening carefully to the testimonies of women, the Judicial Council makes the following preliminary decisions and recommendations.
II. THE FIVE THEMATIC CRIMES
Many crimes have been committed!
In the face of these crimes, all actors, including local authorities, national governments and the international community, have failed to act.
We have heard testimonies about a large number of crimes and about heroic resistance.
They include:
1. The crime of war against the civilian population
Including the following acts:
– Separation of men and women
– Killings and disappearances of children, men, women, elderly people
– Break-up of families
– Forcible removal from homes
– Destruction of property, including homes
– Internal displacement, especially women
– Civilians, including women, forced into military roles to defend themselves
– Torture and humiliating and degrading treatment
2. The crime of using women’s bodies as a battlefield
Including the following acts:
– Extreme manifestations of sexual violence during armed conflict including rape, multiple rapes, sexual torture and humiliation, detention for sexual violence and other forms of sexual violence
– Continuing sexual violence after the conflict in the public and private spheres of life
– Survivors pushed into extreme poverty post-conflict
3. The crime of militaristic violence
Including the following acts:
– Production of rigid gender identities through militarization
– Increased repression and abuse of women
– Valuing of militaristic masculinities
– Forced recruitment and mobilization of men and boys
– Abuse of drugs and alcohol to promote war-mongering on the battlefield
– Inciting violence against neighbours
– Silence about state involvement in fermenting hostility and conflict
– Exodus of thousands of men to avoid recruitment
4. The crime of persecution of those who are different in war and peace
Including the following acts:
– Violent production and imposition of identities, including nationalist, ethnic, Roma, religious, gender, sexuality, age and disability identities, in order to divide the community and legitimate violent practices of removal through means such as:
– Still ongoing practices of hatred and exclusion
– Loss of employment, income and social benefits
– Loss of homes and other property rights
– Loss of citizenship rights resulting in statelessness and destitution
– Visible markers of differentiation such as crosses and arm bands
– Making social exclusion, hostility and harassment the norm
– Women forced into traditional roles by, for example,
– Expelling them from the workforce
– Expelling them from their homes
– Reducing access to education
– Leaving them with sole responsibility for children, and removing all social supports
– Burdening them with the responsibility to feed their families and fulfil basic material needs in the context of extreme deprivation
5. The crime of social and economic violence
Includes the following acts:
– Privatization of public assets under cover of war with profits going to privileged elites
– Failing to regulate employers to provide fair, safe, non-exploitative and dignified working conditions, including equal pay and paid maternity leave
– Failure to ensure accrued wages and benefits are paid to employees on termination of employment
– Failure to pay attention to workers complaints and address their legitimate concerns
– Failure to halt and reverse the feminization of unemployment, poverty and misery
All these acts are crimes against peace and violations of human rights, in and of themselves.
Many of these acts also constitute the crime of genocide perpetrated by Serbia against the non-Serb populations.
Further, the acts are also evidence of crimes against humanity committed by all parties to the conflict, including militias.
Women courageously resisted these crimes at the time they were committed and have organized since then to ensure they will never be committed again.
Women have also showed their courage and strength in surviving these crimes and continuing to work together to overcome the ongoing effects that the commission of these crimes has on their lives and the life of the community.
We seek justice for all the testifiers, and for all others who have survived these crimes, as well as for those who have been killed or disappeared as a result of these crimes.
III THE CONTEXT OF THE CRIMES: WAR AS SYSTEMIC CRIMINALITY
Together, the testimonies reveal that these crimes were made possible by systems of criminality, which reinforce and intensify unequal power relations between men and women.
These systems have eight key elements which demonstrate individual responsibility for participation in systemic crimes:
(1) The war criminals included political and military leadership, and intellectual elites. They created and sustained the conflict, and the fascist ethno-nationalist ideologies that are misogynist, heterosexist, and militarized.
These leaders were supported in this by: (2) The militaries, paramilitaries, and armed groups that implemented this ideology through the power of arms and fear;
(3) The media that perpetuated ethno-nationalist ideas of womanhood, motherhood, victimhood and the masculinities that support them;
(4) The professionals that used their skills and positions of power to create ethnic, gender and other differences;
(5) The war profiteers whose self-enriching economic activities sustained the war time economy. These activities impoverished the general population and increased the suffering of women in war, which continues into post-war feminization of poverty;
(6) Senior government and administrative officials who devised and implemented discriminatory and violent regulations that directly impacted upon war-time survival of women. This continues in the post-war period and is not addressed by the provision of reparations and redress;
(7) Religious institutions and religious leaders who participated in this system of criminality; and
(8) The international community which failed to protect those under its care.
IV. THE RESPONSIBILITY
The Judicial Council of the Women’s Court finds:
1. That all the states in the Balkans region are responsible for their part in the planning, execution and concealment of the crimes that have been described. All the states must acknowledge their responsibility publicly, clearly and unequivocally.
2. Citizens are also responsible for their part in supporting, condoning or turning a blind eye to commission of the crimes that have been described. Also, citizens bear public civil responsibility for not alleviating the consequences of the crimes or offering support.
3. For some of the crimes that have been described, religious leadership and communities also bear responsibility, because they have inspired, concealed or justified crimes and violence. Particularly, we have in mind crimes that aimed at the subjugation or denigration of women.
4. For social-economic crimes, responsibility also belongs to the corporations and individuals that profiteered during the wars and in the post-war transition.
All of these crimes share a common thread: they are directed against human dignity. The minimal conditions for human dignity include three meals per day, a secure roof over one’s head, respect for women, absence of violence, decent work and women’s solidarity. There are too many women for whom these conditions are still not available. Governments in all the states that have succeeded the former Yugoslavia must fulfill them. We demand this unconditionally.
V. RECOMMENDATIONS
Together with all those who have listened to your testimonies, the Judicial Council of the Women’s Court has heard your calls for truth, justice, reparations, and a commitment that these crimes will never recur. The following preliminary recommendations are directed toward that end.
1. The history that is presented by these testimonies and the five years of work of the Women’s Court must be recorded and made public in many ways. In addition to the publications prepared for the Women’s Court, we recommend this history be made widely available through radio, TV and in social media as well as in teaching, especially in history, text books and libraries. There should also be monuments and awards honoring women survivors and resisters. We commit to take what we have heard here and make this information and analysis more public in our countries and globally.
2. There must be an end to militarism and to the ways in which it manipulates and reinforces gender roles. Full disarmament should be implemented and military spending must be reduced in favor of spending for social needs. The enforced mobilization of civilians by the military and the privatization of security must be opposed.
3. The economic and social human rights of women, including the right to work, to equal and regular pay, to paid maternity and parental leave, to adequate housing, social security and health care, including reproductive and sexual rights, must be upheld by governments. The particular impact on women of unpaid and invisible care work should be recognized and remunerated. Observance of ILO (International Labor Organization) and CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women) standards should be implemented as the minimum obligation of governments and employers.
4. The privatization of public goods and of state responsibility for the social welfare of its citizens must be reversed. Social and economic justice is both an individual and a collective right for all.
5. Governments have a due diligence responsibility for providing women with justice and working to end all forms of violence against women and human rights abuses in war, as well as peace time. This requires the provision of services, such as health care, crisis support, safe housing, legal aid and other forms of social security.
6. Governments have responsibility for providing reparations and redress and for ending the impunity of perpetrators of crimes against women. This requires effective investigation, prosecution and punishment in a criminal justice system that enables women to give evidence with dignity. Ending of impunity must prevent convicted war criminals from holding public office. Equally, measures must be taken to prevent their celebration as heroes.
7. States and other social institutions, such as the media, educational systems, religious entities, families, as well as individuals, all share in responsibility for ending the patriarchal and militaristic attitudes that perpetuate and feed all forms of violence and discrimination against women.
8. Individuals and communities at all levels must undertake to condemn intolerance and violence on the basis of all differences (such as ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality, age, or disability) used to divide and exclude people. In particular, on-going practices of hatred based on these grounds must be challenged and shifted toward trust building and respect for the basic human dignity and rights of all, despite differences.
Women say: Truth, Justice, Reparations, Solidarity and Never Again.
Judicial Council Members:
Professor Vesna Rakic-Vodinelic (Belgrade, Serbia) President
Charlotte Bunch (Center for Women’s Global Leadership, Rutgers University, USA)
Dr Kirsten Campbell (Goldsmiths College, London, UK)
Gorana Mlinarevic (activist and a feminist researcher, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Professor Dianne Otto (Melbourne Law School, Australia)
Dr Latinka Perovic (Institute for the History of Serbia, Belgrade, Serbia)
Vesna Terselic (Documenta – Centre for Dealing with the Past, Zagreb, Croatia)
