Gender Justice: Access to Justice, Effective Institutions and Structural Transformation (CSW70 Side Event)

Good afternoon to everyone. With an enormous responsibility, I share with all present the responsibility to deal with such a fundamental topic in women's lives and all planet. My name is Sandra Kennedy, National Secretary of Institutional Articulation, Thematic Actions and Political Participation at the Ministry of Women of Brazil. It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to talk about this central topic to the promotion of human rights and strengthening of contemporary democracies: gender justice and access to justice to women and girls. We are together in this space at a very significant time, a meeting under CSW in a context of a profound civilization crisis. There is no other way to describe the moment we are experiencing today because it is a moment of deep, persistent, and structural scenario of income inequality, social inequality, and concentration of wealth. And it is in this background that our debate takes place: the need to guarantee and strengthen access to justice to women and girls in all the planet. This includes to promote judicial systems that are more egalitarian and inclusive, eliminate laws that are discriminatory, face structural barriers that still limit the effectiveness of this fundamental right. Because the access to justice, it's not an abstract principle. We know this, we are living this in our territories. It constitutes a fundamental and cross-cutting right that affects all parts of our lives: public life, family life, the right to live free of intolerance, gender violence, access to health, sexual and reproductive rights, and the possibilities to economic empowerment. But what in practice means access to justice? Who indeed is able to access justice today in our backgrounds, in our countries, in our context? Who is left behind? Because to talk about justice access is not about courts, laws, procedures. It's to talk about something much more concrete in women's lives: who is, who can be heard, listened to, who can denounce, who can live free of fear. Because this topic, and I would like to highlight, without gender justice with class specification, social class, equality is only a privilege masked as a right. This is the central topic we discuss tonight. Gender justice when analyzed by the class perspective reveals that inequalities do not touch women in similar ways. Women from the peripheries and informal workers have to face them in a deeper way. A lack of financial assets, physical distance, and symbolic distance from institutions. And in this context, income inequality becomes inequality of rights, limiting the capacity to denounce violence, access legal services, of quality legal services, and to assure effective protection. Justice access cannot be understood only as the existence of laws and courts, but a real possibility of being used. For women in vulnerability situation, economic vulnerability, transportation costs, absence of information, fear of retaliation, financial dependency are factors that challenge this access. We do know that. Institutions that do not take into account these structural inequalities end up reproducing exclusions, becoming often inaccessible for those who most need them. Therefore, efficient institutions and culture transformation demands to fight the bases of inequality. Public policies that integrate social assistance, economic and autonomy protection, and promoting institutional reforms that make the system more inclusive, fast, and sensible to the realities of the popular classes. Without this, gender justice is incomplete, unable to break away from the historic explosion cycles that touch the lives of so many women. So it's not, therefore, strengthening only the institutions. Access to justice is to have real conditions to reinvigorate rights, to have progression, and to have redress without violence. Means, lastly, to live with dignity, equality, freedom. We, public managers, we ask ourselves and we challenge ourselves to transform this reality. In Brazil, we have been investing in institutional reforms, legislative transformations, public policies, specialized courts. Important advances, but very far from being enough to change the structures we now describe. We understand that it's essential to change the socioeconomic conditions that people live because this is a direct relation between inequality and justice, access to justice. When inequality increases, access is reduced, and when the access is reduced, inequality is perpetuated. To break away from this cycle is not just making small changes, but look at the structures, cultural conceptions, and social practices. In this context, the debate today happened. The democratic fragilization processes that happen in many parts of the world weaken institutions. It is part of this strategy of growth of the most conservative sectors of the extreme right. They reduce the spaces for social participation. We are not dealing only with institutional breaches, but with deep disputes of the model of society we want to have. Therefore, it is so important to be here and I thank all of you and we'll now invite for each one of us to have five minutes in their intervention. It's a very powerful table, very representative table, and we will start with the Executive Secretary of the UNDP, Mrs. Al-Waid. Thank you for being here.

Thank you, Sandra, and thank you for setting out and framing the conversation that we are having today, obviously being part of the broader CSW70 conversation focusing on access to justice for women and girls and equality for all. Thank you for giving UNDP the opportunity to be part of this discussion and many gratitude to the organizers of this event, the governments of South Africa, Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, who are also really key partners for UNDP in the work that we do. Let me just start by saying that across many countries, we do know that women still face many barriers on accessing justice at multiple levels. And some of these are institutional. Of course, you already spoke about courts, justice systems, laws not being enough. And we also do know that quite a lot of the challenges that we see as barriers on access to justice are really also driven by a lot of inequalities, a lot of social norms, economic exclusion, all of which shape who can realistically access justice, what are the distances that those seeking justice have to travel, legal costs, legal awareness, and many issues which also center around distrust in institutions. We know we are living in a era of democratic backsliding. We know we are experiencing a huge assault on the rule of law, broadly speaking, whether at national level, at regional level, or at global level. And all of this comes into play and does affect where women and girls are placed when it comes to the issue of accessing justice. And why does this really matter for us? I would say that for UNDP, through the work that we are doing within the Global Programme for the Rule of Law, but more in particular with a partnership that we have with UN Women on the Gender Justice Platform, we are supporting different countries, in particular focusing on institutions, because we know this is often where the change is very difficult to achieve. We are focusing on institutions, really targeting the idea of increasing women's participation, engagement, and leadership in justice institutions and justice systems. You will see I consistently use the word justice systems, noting that some of the spaces where women are seeking justice are not necessarily formal institutions. We know that there are court systems of justice which are customary, which are religious, which are for indigenous people, some of which are not recognized legally, and yet these are really key entry points for women to access justice. Women's participation in judiciaries and justice institutions and systems matter for several reasons. First, representation strengthens institutional legitimacy. Courts that reflect the diversity of society, and here I mean diversity in its true sense, build greater public trust. We know we are operating oftentimes in our movements of intersectionality. We are really talking about all the different isms that we need to take into account. So when we are talking about representation, I think this is again a very key and critical point we need to think about. We do know that women in judiciaries, women on the bench, women judges still face huge barriers even within the institutions where they are working: limited career paths, they are facing stereotypes, they are facing harassment. Increasingly, online abuse is targeting women in leadership. We have testimonies and testimonies of women who are sitting on the bench who are being trolled on the internet. Technology-facilitated gender-based violence or digital crimes are a big challenge and continue to affect women who are trying as much as they can to serve us in these public spaces and face all these enormous challenges. So the idea really is not, is quite simple in terms of the work that we are doing as UNDP, but I do think it's powerful. We are really working to connect women across justice systems, to strengthen leadership pathways, to support institutional reforms, and to make justice systems more inclusive. So rather than just focusing on individual trainings, which we know are critically important, we are also facilitating through the Gender Justice Platform work across three levels: supporting women leaders within the institutions themselves, strengthening institutional policies and accountability systems, building networks for peer-to-peer learning across the countries. And I will just cite a few examples before I know my time will be up soon. The first one being some of the work that we are doing in Africa. We did a study of 14 countries in Africa trying to gauge and understand where women are placed, and we really did see a huge range in terms of variation of both representation of women across the institutions, but also in particular in positions of leadership. Of course, the challenges that they continue to face continue to present a barrier. In Kenya, for example, women judges have influenced jurisdiction on inheritance, matrimonial property rights, expanding protections for women. Several African countries have also seen women rise to the highest judicial positions, including as Chief Justices and heads of constitutional courts, and we do believe that this is critically important. I will give one more example, which is the work that we are doing in Asia-Pacific under the UNDP flagship program Shift Underway: Women in Justice. This initiative is bringing women across South Asia to really form a platform and a network of engagement and supporting each other in the roles that they play, and in particular where they are receiving a lot of political backlash in the roles that they play. I will stop here for now, but I do believe that some of these examples I'm sharing are critically important and valuable also for Latin America and for other regions of the world in terms of taking this work forward and continuing to create a critical mass of women leaders within our justice institutions. Thank you.

Absolutely important, the exchange of information. We are going to invite the representatives from Mexico, then South Africa to talk. And now I invite Geraldine Gashus, the Minister of State for Women from Mexico. How the justice system can respond to structural difficulties. You have five minutes.

Thank you. Greetings to all of you who are joining us this afternoon. A very warm thank you to the government of Brazil, the Minister of Women of Brazil. Really, for Mexico, our partnership and our collaboration in this gender issues is really significant and really important. It's a partnership from the Global South that really is a source of pride and we want to continue to expand. I would like to greet our colleagues that are also around the table, our colleagues from Colombia and South Africa, our colleagues from UNFPA, Equality Now, UN Women, MESECVI. It's really an honor to address you and to share this space with you. For Mexico, access to justice is really an element for women and young girls. It's crucial for to have substantive equality, gender equality, and the rule of law. Of course, it's an enabling right and all the international instruments recognize it as such. For example, the CEDAW and of course the report from the hemisphere that Patricia will expand on in a minute. These instruments not only recognize rights, but they also establish concrete obligations for member states in the area of prevention, reparation, and prevention of violence and discrimination against women. We know, of course, in Mexico that the challenge is not just normative in nature, it's structural. As our colleague was saying, these barriers are multiple in number: economic inequality, gender stereotypes, lack of access to legal information, geographical distance. And I would like to also mention the lack of intersectional focus and to perceive women not only in singular but also in plural. We're diverse and we live in different contexts and we have different needs. So for Mexico, access to justice should be intersectional. That is why we've implemented actions to recognize the rights of Afro-descendant women, of indigenous women in rural areas, women living with disabilities, and so on. Following the first term of the first ever female president, we've put together and we've implemented substantive gender equality, so it is reflected in the constitution. And also we want to promote the elimination of violence against women. In particular, these reforms establish the strengthening of specialized prosecutors to investigate and prosecute femicides and other gender-based crimes. There are centers of justice for women. These are a fundamental axis to support women that are suffering situations of violence. We're promoting national campaigns to change non-social patterns and social norms. And also there's a coordination between the three branches of government because only through this coordination we can really promote actions that can facilitate access to justice for women. On top of this, and of course we need to accept that this is a complex issue and we're doing everything we can to support Mexican women. Mexico has a public policy that's called Free Centers. These are comprehensive care centers that provide services to women to promote their human rights, to improve their financial empowerment and autonomy, and to promote these cultural changes. In 2025, we created 678 centers in Mexico and this investment will be increased to 48.6 representing 48.6% in their budget. We'll have new centers in all the states. We also implemented a program to provide legal assistance for women and girls to strengthen access to justice. In 2025, we'll also launch the network, which is a national strategy through the Ministry of Women in Mexico recognizes and convene women leaders in their communities to strengthen their leaderships. We believe that these leaderships locally are really crucial to promote their autonomy and therefore the information of their rights and access to justice. And also key element to promote the elimination of violence in this is linked to access to justice is online violence. On March 8th, when we were commemorating International Women's Day, our Ministry of Women signed an initial agreement, a partnership with digital platforms to fight online violence. This is part of what we've done. Of course, as I've run out of time, we would just like to reaffirm our commitment with the strengthening of human rights of women and also with the national obligations that we have on the women's theme. And recently, Mexico was at the 10th report and we also have recommendations that we have to comply with and also we are to affect with the Inter-American environment to follow the recommendations made.

With the president, let's hear about the experiences from South Africa by the Department of Justice of South Africa through Ms. Braisy Kambula.

Madam Chair, it is indeed with great humility for us as South Africa to participate in this engagement. Our discussions today extend beyond the strictest legal sense, but for many women and girls in South Africa, the role of justice in addressing gender-based violence and femicide is fundamental, imperative for the achievement of the social and economic justice. In South Africa, access to justice is a constitutional imperative which must be afforded to all persons irrespective of whether you are a non-national or a national. It is critical that we build a justice system that protects our women and girls from degrading and violent customary practices. Recently, the South African Presidential Summit Declaration against gender-based violence and femicide called for a justice system that is tailor-made to respond effectively to the needs of all survivors. And this is a summit, a presidential summit declaration that our president signed together with the civil society organizations to ensure that in all endeavors that we do against gender-based violence and femicide, we do it collectively with the civil society organizations. Bearing on this premise, the need to address the scourge of gender-based violence and femicide, we have made a number of gender-responsive interventions. Just recently, our GBV laws were amended to establish a more survivor-centric system to curb the incidence of femicide. Courts are now empowered to issue domestic violence safety monitoring notice, which calls for police monitoring of the survivors. The safety of the survivor must always receive precedence. In our law, no court is permitted to grant a bail to a perpetrator who has a domestic relationship with the survivor without first issuing a protection order against such perpetrator. This is meant to curb the femicide cases that would occur after the perpetrator is released on bail. Additionally, our DNA legislation and targeted multi-sectoral interventions have made significant inroads in finalizing court cases, particularly of sex crimes and femicide cases. We have also recognized the lived reality of many women and having aimed physical access to formal justice mechanisms. As such, online applications for protection orders are now legally permitted and so easy the online service of protection orders. We have started in South Africa to serve a protection orders online. Last month, our courts also commenced with the authorization of service of protection orders via WhatsApp platform, no later than 24 hours after the issue of such order. This is an innovation we are encouraging our sister partners to ensure that it's a speedy service of protection orders. We are deeply aware that the justice system is usually criticized for being nebulous and difficult to navigate. However, recent actions have been taken to address this criticism and make the justice system more proactive and trusted by our people. For instance, the Domestic Violence Act affords children locus standi to act against their abusers. The South African Police Service establishes the victim-friendly rooms at police stations to ensure that there is privacy during the statement taking. Our homegrown Thuthuzela Care Centres that are the one-stop centers that are prosecution-driven continue to provide legal, medical, and psychosocial support services and prosecution-guided investigations. Our sexual offenses courts are also homegrown, have been legislated now to provide a catalog of support services intended to create a caring, responsive, agile, and effective court experience. The National Prosecuting Authority continues to offer a court preparation program to witnesses to ensure that they are emotionally and mentally ready to testify. We also have recently amended the legal aid regulations to ensure that they are providing support to witnesses. Now, let me move. In South Africa, justice delayed is justice denied. To eliminate the culture of backlog matters, we need new insights and transformative shift from the conventional way of doing things. In South Africa, we introduced the 100-day challenge, which is intended to reduce and to eliminate the backlog matters. As I conclude, Chair, we need to rise together to repair and rehabilitate the soul of the criminal justice system. In my country, this is viewed as a fundamental and the critical step to realize the full empowerment of women and girls. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much for sharing your powerful experience and we can see the similarities and challenges. Brazil, we are going to give the floor to a judge in Brazil, Teresa Cabral. Brazil has a law that inspires the whole world, the Maria da Penha Law that celebrates 20 years. It's a law against femicide that is being debated now regarding misogyny against women. And we have the challenge to give women full access to the justice system. We're going to give the floor now to the presiding judge of domestic and family violence against women, Teresa Cabral. You have five minutes.

First, I'd like to thank the Ministry of Women for the and the government of Brazil for this invitation to open this space for us. Can you hear me? So I thank you for the invitation to participate in this debate, particularly because it is inserted into a structure that all of us believe is its important to have access to justice for women in situations of violence. And now I greet my fellow panel members and those who are part of this panel to create this space for us to dialogue. I wanted to talk about some actions that have been taken to qualify this justice and understand that the government of South Africa that we have as she said, justice delayed is justice denied. We cannot guarantee the human rights of women in this manner. And with our law, which is Maria da Penha Law, I think all of you know was a very important and express important process in drafting it and in now in implementing it. We understand these to be necessary for us to combat violence. As this project was developed, there were analysis conducted on access to justice with a focus on what is needed because I have a very low voice, I'm sorry. So to bring an analysis about what is access to justice, but the academic aspect about all studies and all feminist theories that were drafted long time ago, the premises needed so we for us to have access. To look at the normative aspects and the way the law was established and bring it to the implementation and for what it is the rights of women and bring it within this democratic risk in which we are live that we are living right now. So from this premise and taking into account that are difficulties in the application in the implementation of this legislative measure and from an analysis of a collective that brings us to evaluate what's needed to assure the human rights of women and their access to justice. We then elaborated within the forum, which is a forum of judges that work with the combat of violence and domestic violence. From the government of 2024, we sought other institutions and institutionalities to elaborate a project that could effectively qualify the access of to justice of women. We established a dialogue and an access that would be collective so that this project elaboration would be feasible. We held meetings with SENEV, the Ministry of Women, and Geledés, legal prosecutors, and institutions that we have in Brazil and other Latin American countries that bring this popular education context and the Maria da Penha Consortium, which is an organization which right before drafting the Maria da Penha Law follows up on the implementation of this law, academics of this feminist group, National Council of Women's Rights, National Council of Women, UN Women, etc. From this collective context, we elaborated and we brought to you as a project to be done to establish procedures for urgent protective orders. So we created a forum with to allow for permanent dialogue with the justice system, who does this follow-up with one goal: to bring to the implementation of law what is effectively the intention of the Maria da Penha Law, which was to produce a national policy for facing violence and fighting violence that have as one of its main aspects the full protection of women in violence situation. So I would like to tell you that in this room we have some of the members of this forum: Fabiana, Taís, Carla, Patrícia, and so many other colleagues that were part of this forum. And after many discussions and measures, we got to this procedure. And why this protective order? Because despite the fact of having a normative text that is important for facing violence and assure human rights, we hadn't established in this context the procedure for the protective orders. In the absence of uncertainties, such as the form that this instrument could be implemented, this brought brought some challenges to women in the most important moment, which is protection and strengthening of human rights. So this is what I wanted to talk to you. I'm sorry I went above my time. Thank you for this listening space and I thank you again for the opportunity and I'm available for any questions that could be needed. I thank you specifically for bring to us and this experience and we make to all available this experience, the experience of the forum in Brazil. And taking into account a very difficult role, which is a coordination of a table, which is managing the time of everyone, I apologize and we will try to now find be done within five minutes, otherwise we will not be able to give the word or give the floor to everyone.

And now we bring we will now have the social director for VBG Equality Now, Tamar Dekanosidze. Associate Director of GBV Equality Now. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Hello everyone and thank you very much for having me here. I work at Equality Now, which is an international human rights organization, and we work globally to address violence and discrimination against women and girls and ensure legal and systemic change. For us, access to justice is not a technical issue. It is a power issue. And across the world, we see that not only the gaps in the justice system, but the systems that are functioning exactly as designed, excluding women and girls who are subjected to violence and discrimination by men. If justice systems are built on patriarchal, economic, and political inequalities, they will reproduce those inequalities unless they are fundamentally transformed. And transforming criminal justice systems worldwide is one of our priority areas. We see an increasing need for shifting from formal rights to real justice, as many countries today have basic laws that address violence and discrimination against women and girls. However, we still see that impunity remains the norm. And this is especially applies for sexual violence and violence against women and girls with disabilities. Sexual violence still remains a crime for which perpetrators enjoy overwhelming impunity and survivors are overwhelmingly denied justice. And this is not only because of how laws are framed, but also because of their discriminatory interpretation, evidentiary barriers, institutional disbelief of survivors, and other systemic and structural factors. The reason sexual violence is one of our priority areas at Equality Now is that sexual violence is a test case of criminal justice systems. Sexual violence exposes the deepest failures of justice systems, since it still is treated as a matter of morality rather than a matter of a human rights violation. Consent-based definitions of rape are still lacking in many jurisdictions across the world and survivors still face retraumatization within the justice systems. And at Equality Now, our work in different parts of the world has shown that even where the laws are reformed, implementation often fails. Cases are dropped, downgraded, or never reach the court. If a system cannot deliver justice for sexual violence, it is not a functioning justice system. Intersectionality also remains to be a problematic issue as access to justice is deeply unequal within women themselves. We have seen that women with disabilities, rural women, women facing digital abuse, women in authoritarian or backlash contexts are overwhelmingly denied justice. Our work in Central Asia on sexual violence and disability, for example, has shown that survivors with disabilities face systemic exclusion at every stage, which includes reporting, evidence, court participation, and justice systems are simply often not designed to work for all. At the same time, we see a global backlash and shrinking civil space. And we must name this correctly, this reality, that there is a coordinated global backlash against gender equality and laws, institutions, and funding are being increasingly reshaped to restrict rights. This directly impacts access to justice as NGOs are criminalized, survivors silenced, legal protections weakened. What we need is structural transformation at every level. This includes legal transformation, reforming laws around the world to ensure a consent-based definition. We need institutional transformation, economic transformation, and representation and participation of communities involved and affected. And our work has shown that even in the most restrictive and repressive contexts, change is possible and international human rights law and local legal and human rights mechanisms are a powerful tool to achieve this change. In Georgia, for example, our work and collaboration with authorities has increased prosecutions of sexual violence by 76% and convictions by 44%. And we do not just need better systems, we need different systems, and this is what real gender justice looks like in practice. Thank you.

Wow. To evolve, transform formal rights for concrete justice, end of impunity. Let's listen now to Luz Patricia Mejía, Executive Secretary of the Follow-up Mechanism of the Convention of Belém do Pará, MESECVI. A very important convention for us women.

Thank you, Sandra, and thank you to Brazil for supporting this process and we're going to introduce the fourth report, fourth MESECVI report. We have very limited time through this follow-up mechanism of the Belém do Pará Convention. We assess access to justice for women in the region and we divided it into different phases: what are the normative frameworks, the transformation of the state structure, resource allocation, the establishment of systems, and then data gathering. So we worked with 137 indicators. We're not going to see them all because we don't have enough time, but I wanted to point out very briefly a crucial element in the region. This region globally has the highest recognition of women's rights globally. So this means that we have more than 240 norms in Latin America that recognize that violence against women should be punished, prevented, and eradicated, and 70 norms that recognize in the within the framework of that violence that there's a differentiated impact on women. It's not the same type of violence that girls and adolescents suffer, or if it's a woman with a disability or an indigenous woman and so on. Furthermore, most countries in Latin America recognize femicide or the violent death of women as an aggravated offense as compared to traditional homicide. So we have a region that recognizes within the law the clear and differentiated impact of violence against women and girls. However, when we conduct an analysis as to how women within that intersectional framework, and I'll just show you some figures about this violence, we see that almost 2 million reported cases, there's almost 2 million reported cases from the states that responded that have an indicator of women disability, only 80,000 women received some of these services of assistance that countries in the region offer. And speaking of girls, we realize that when we talk about harmful practices, child marriage and forced marriage, sexual violence and so on, and forced pregnancies, we see some of the elements in the region. Despite the fact that it is prohibited to have intercourse with women or girls that are under 18 and there's an aggravated offense, we still see more than 226 girls that got pregnant in Latin America each year. So these are girls that are victims of sexual violence, out of whom 620 girls, or rather 620 girls every day get pregnant. That means that a girl is pregnant every two minutes. We're talking about more than 24,000 girls that were married or forced into marriage as children. That means that every day 70 girls get married. And these are just the ones that are legally married. We're not talking about civil partnerships and live as a couple. So we've seen an increase in terms of the normative reforms, also in the sense of reparation, but barely any states provide any information on processes of reparation for women, on actual reparation. And when we address structural gaps that we just talked about, we realize that in the majority of these countries that provide free legal counseling, very few countries in Latin America actually provide full support during these legal procedures and proceedings. Only a very small percentage that actually are cases that are prosecuted actually have full legal support. In Argentina is only 0.22%, in Mexico 6.1%, Paraguay 0.64%. This is data from 2018 to 2022. When we talk about comprehensive care centers, we see that it's division, for instance, indigenous women or women with disability usually don't have access to these services. If you want to, I'm going very, very fast. This presentation and this report is accessible at belendopara.org. The gap is here. I wanted to show you in most countries to prevent and punish this violence, those who reported a budget, none of them are investing more than $2.2 per year per woman. And if we disaggregate this data, we realize that when it comes to punishing violence against women, we see that it only less than 1% of the GDP in each country is allocated to addressing this violence. So this is a gap of care, of budgeting to really prevent, punish, and eradicate violence against women. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Miss Luz Patricia. I give the floor immediately to the regional director for UN Women, Sarah Douglas.

Thank you, Madam Moderator, and I would like to thank the Ministry of Women of Brazil. It's really an honor and a pleasure to participate at this panel and to see such a packed room in this second week of CSW. It's wonderful to see so many people. I would also like to thank Colombia, Mexico, and South Africa for joining us and also MESECVI, of course, for providing this information and the data that is so, so important. Access to justice is a human right, an enabling human right, and the elimination of violence, gender-based violence, and the full exercise of health, reproductive health and rights, and the full economic autonomy of women is key. Despite normative accesses that are relevant, women and girls continue to face multiple barriers and structural barriers to access justice. There are economic barriers, procedural, legal, geographical barriers, and sociocultural barriers, gender stereotypes, discriminatory practices, low representation of women in judicial position and decision-making positions. To guarantee justice is not only to have adequate legal frameworks, it also requires effective institutions, sustained public policies, specialized services, and accessible mechanisms that can allow and permit women to exercise their rights in practice, not only that they are recognized on paper. So the structural transformation implies going beyond formal participation of women. It implies democratizing the design, institutional design, and revising the power architecture of justice systems and guaranteeing that women and girls can exercise their full agency in all the dimensions of their lives. At UN Women, we highlight that gender justice requires an intersectional focus that is transformative in nature, that recognizes cumulative inequalities due to poverty, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, migration status. In this regard, we would like to call our member states to enhance the substantive participation of women in justice systems in all of decision-making processes, including leadership in the legal system, the judiciary, to ensure specialized services, psychosocial support, legal assistance that should be free of charge, and protection orders that are efficient for women who are living in a situation of violence. And three, promoting international cooperation, exchanging good practices, and a better articulation between states, regional mechanisms, and the civil society. This CSW70 asks us to go from commitments to action. Legal frameworks are important, but what really transforms lives is its effective implementation. UN Women would like to reaffirm its commitment with the construction of a legal system that are equal and effective by strengthening the institution to ensure justice for all women and girls. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much, in addition to the contribution listening to all women and the academia, universities, bringing their contributions. And we will invite Professor Fabiana Severi. She is the head of the public law in the University of São Paulo in Ribeirão Preto. Thank you, you have the floor.

Can you hear me? Okay. Well, I thank you for the invitation by the Ministry of Women in Brazil and for the opportunity to dialogue with other women in this panel. As president of as a representative from academia, I'd like to talk quickly about the effects of democratic steps back, especially in my area, in access to justice. I also wanted to share some Brazilian experiences to promote gender and racial justice. The democratic regime in Brazil inaugurated by in 1988 by our constitution, anti-racist movements strengthened and could create strategies. It is part of this model, the approval of our law to combat domestic violence, Maria da Penha. There are profound institutional changes in every side with specialized justice, judges, and intersectional gender approach, and also networks of assistance, gender parity, and ethnic-racial parity to expand judicial capacity to implement women's rights. In 20 years of Maria da Penha, the trajectory of the implementation of law in the judiciary shows a pattern that is similar in other countries. The change has been slow, gradual, incremental, and although positive, they were much lesser than what was needed. Public agents that are engaged operating within systems and less by institutional capacity in the judiciary. This model has gone through strong restrictions by authoritarian regimes. I'm not talking about formal regimes, but the authoritarian regimes is characterized by defending the continuity of the patriarchal control of women, low representation of women in politics. This regime seeks to impose in several regions of the world through cultural crusades against the so-called gender ideology. This regime does not depend on authoritarian governments, but it has a symbiotic relationship with these authoritarian governments. During the conservative government that has marked the recent past in Brazil and other countries, the public budget for social protection of women that are victims of violence were practically extinct. Women's organizations and anti-racism organizations were persecuted. Maria da Penha focused on the guarantee of human rights became a model on a model focused on increasing sentences. What is suggested is that since mid-2015, we are migrating from a model of incremental change to a model that is more conservative, defending women but not equality. We have a federal government now that revisits these recent decisions. We were stagnated in terms of specialized services for domestic violence, but they are and they are concentrated in large cities. The greatest rates of femicide occur, however, in small cities. We have the National Council of Justice and the resistance, internal resistance in among judges is still high. We also face other forms of resistance. In 20 years, we have added judicial professionals, including judges, who are committed to constitution. If they are not still, they are making a difference and building resistances and alliances with feminist anti-racism movements and the academia. So the question: how can the justice system support gender and feminist and anti-racism movements? We have four options that refer to alliances between democrats, justice, and academia. First, the marches. Last year, we had the march of black women and we have a history of peasant and indigenous women marches. These marches, these mobilizations, they are they voice their demands and they are used in the judiciary system as references. There is also a the campaign for a black woman in the Supreme Court. The campaign was able to highlight the low presence of women in the Supreme in the judiciary. The third is rewriting feminism in academia. More than 125 feminists rewrote judicial decisions so we can have judicial decisions that are more compatible. And lastly, the participation of Ministry of Women in the National Permanent Forum on the Maria da Penha Law, which was mentioned by Judge Teresa. It's one of the most experience important experiences in terms of strengthening democracy after Maria da Penha Law, which puts independent a public document that is most important and also creates a dialogue between public agents and academia, resulting not only in an important document but in an experience of democratic dialogue. Thank you.

Your comments are absolutely incredible, each of your participation in this panel. Even without the opportunity to start a debate, we would like to do it because deepening the issues that were brought up here today are is very important. But we have time limitations. At the same time, we are happy to see that throughout this world there are many good experiences happening in a resistance in a crisis that we are facing. With the threats to democracy, weakening our systems, reverberating in the weakening of institutions, the patriarchal system that insists on conforming us, the justice system, which just a comment before they kick us out. Even though this is profoundly important, many countries and Brazil, we have gone forward in regulations and legislation that gives us protection. But it's still necessary for us to make more progress toward more effective access to justice for women and girls. I see many people around the table and I can't name them because of a lack of time. I have representatives from the judiciary, feminist activists, managers of women policies. We have a meeting that is very representative. We are going to take this to Minister Marcel Lopes, the understanding of how important this panel was. Thanks to the governments of Colombia, Mexico, South Africa, who helped us promote this debate. We are together, women and men, toward access to justice for women and girls throughout the world and together we are strengthened by the lives of women, by the lives of all women on the planet. Thank you very much for this opportunity.

I actually have a good news. We have 10 more minutes. So I thought it was 2:00 PM, we have more 10 more minutes. I think we can we will need time to take a picture and we need to mobilize to be here next year. But in 5 minutes, maybe we can hear two or three comments. Okay, can be four. Two minutes each.

Please identify yourself because I didn't take your names down. Thank you and please turn on your microphone, otherwise the interpreters cannot hear you. Please. Yes, thank you. I would like to just make a thought-provoking comment. The problem in Brazil in the beginning we said of justice access a question of social class and I'd like to reinforce that in the Brazilian context it's also the access to justice is also a racial question. The important point present in the CSW document of this year that mentions the colonial aggregates, that what black women experience in our countries is the colonial legacies of a historic processes that structured inequalities and continue to inspire and operate in Brazilian institutions. While we are here promoting dialogue about women in a general context, we cannot not mention this particular aspect. Thank you. My name is Jozeli Kling and I am councilwoman in Monte Redondo and while we're participating in this forum, I would like to make a report that is very the Dr. Teresa's speech was very important when she talks the delay in access to justice. In my town today, Diane Menezes dos Santos died, 36 years old. She was shot in her chest, in her stomach and in her arm in front of her minor children. Diane had a protective order, but this did not a military police of São Paulo state to keep his gun, keep his weapon. Her ex-husband went to her gate, shot against her, and Diane today goes into the statistics. And I ask you all, until when? Which one of us will have to be a target so that protective orders can work and for us women not to have only a little bit of paper in our pocket? Men need to respect it. Today it's being voted in Brazil the project that criminalizes misogyny and the debate is essential but it's the actions are more important. But we do not need other Dianes to become a statistic and here is my condolences to the family because unfortunately today we lost Diane. Diane is present, Diane is present.

The lady in blue, please.

Derbyshire, I'm the USA campaign director for CitizenGO. And I want to thank you all for your work. I have seven daughters and 10 granddaughters, so this is very important to me. Two of my daughters have actually been victims of domestic violence and and this idea of having justice and advancing gender justice through structural transformation is absolutely important. And I want to ask, though, how are institutions ensuring that legal protections grounding in biological sex for women and girls are still not diminished? One of the domestic violence perpetrators against one of my daughters has now decided that he is a woman. And so he now has the same protections that my daughter has. So how are we going to in these evolving gender frameworks going to introduce something to protect the rights of biological women?

Who comes next?

Good afternoon. I am public defender, my name is Taís, Rio de Janeiro. The Brazilian model of legal assistance is enshrined in the constitution, thousands that serve 30 million people, majority women in several aspects of justice access. Last year in Rio de Janeiro, we took over 1 million women cases. To example, we give individual assistant to women victims of violence in all processes. Femicide victims also have assistance of all psychological support. We serve all women in jails to assure that they don't lose the care of their children who are outside the jails. We are independent to litigate against the state, even in collective bargains to guarantee care for the children so women can continue to work and we have special agencies to serve women victims of violence. We the top and also environmental justice. But we have our incumbents as in addition judicial we have extrajudicial and rights education rights. And I have a questions for the representatives of the other countries who would like to know if in the other countries there's a public institution similar to the Brazilian model to the defense and collective and individual defense of the women's rights. Thank you.

Good afternoon, my name is Patrícia Carvalho, I'm a lawyer and I coordinate Criola policy that is part of Maria da Penha Law that was mentioned here. And I would like to contribute to this debate saying Criola generates data that shows that race acts in the formulation of access of black women access to justice. In addition class, race as a specific category and we have to say there's a study field in civil society organizations as Criola and academics in Brazil have many data that corroborate this field. And in many areas I've I talk about race as an autonomous and specific way to have access to justice and I can talk about race, gender, racist stereotypes, and actors of justice system and the challenge in recognizing the framing of violence in domestic violence, Maria da Penha Law, it's also mentioned it's a public policy example and legislation that has unequal access by black women. And in number five, we recognize an framing based on race in terms of gender-based violence. These are some examples, but I would like to highlight the point that race and racism need to be understand at a single autonomous category when we talk about access to justice. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Criola has a very important role. And now indeed our time is over and I end here with UN organizers telling us that it's over, but I would like to take a group photo and in the on behalf of the Ministry of Women I'd like to reaffirm that our ministry is a ministry for all women in their intersectionalities, even women trans and transvestite women. This is the position of the Brazilian government. And I invite you all to this picture. Thank you.