Reviews
On trial at the women’s court: gender violence, justice and citizenship
Adriana Zaharijević
Is alternative justice possible? If yes, how and for whom? If one begins with an assumption that formal legal systems do not side with victims and that, even if the trials prove to be fair, they do not necessarily bring justice to the victims, then one is bound to seek alternative justice. Alternative justice is needed for those who are deprived of power in political, civic and social terms. In other words, for citizens who are somehow below the category of citizen. It is from these premises that the Women’s Courts Movement began to develop. Seeing women as victims, as those who suffer the most during violent conflicts, who experience an uneven distribution of resources and wealth, or an unequal share of power in public and its repercussions in the private sphere, Women’s Courts seek to bring justice to those who are unheard or silenced. Thus this by now global movement aims at giving voice to those who are generally not treated as equal and therefore left without justice in their own respective states.
(adriana tekst zenskisud engleski.pdf)
Graziella Longoni
The Tribunal of Women of Former Jugoslavia: a feminist approach to Giustice.
1.Women, the guardians of Memory
As time goes by, it seems we left behind the days of horror, when war raged in Bosnia-Erzegovina (1992-95), with its macabre appendage of unheard of violences and individual tragedies: the ethnic cleaning planned by the Serbs, with inhabitants of whole villages brutally deported, evicted from their houses and suddenly made into enemies and urìsurpers; the desperate marches of the uprooted ones, the long sieges, children and weakest people starved to death, torture and mass suppression of men, boys and old men; mass graves, concentration camps, crushing terror, women raped, often made slaves in brothel-camps in order to degrade and dishonour them and thus destroy, by a grim patriarchal logic, the adversary’s ethnic roots.
(The Tribunal of Women Graziella Longoni.pdf)
Women’s Court Regional
Organisational Board
Mothers of the Enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa
Foundation CURE (www.fondacijacure.org)
Croatia:
Centre for Women’s Studies (www.zenstud.hr)
Centre for Women War Victims - ROSA (www.czzzr.hr)
Kosovo:
Kosovo Women’s Network (www.womensnetwork.org)
Macedonia:
National Council for Gender Equality (www.sozm.org.mk)
Montenegro:
Anima (www.animakotor.org)
Slovenia:
Women’s Lobby Slovenia (www.zls.si)
Serbia:
Women’s Studies (www.zenskestudie.edu.rs)
Women in Black (www.zeneucrnom.org)