The first episode of ‘Women’s Courts: Feminist Theory in Practice’ is now available. It forms part of the research project “Fifty Years of Women’s Courts”, presented by researcher Natascia Tosel (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Verona; Hannah Arendt Center for Political Studies). The talk introduces the RE-RIGHTING project (Rewriting Rights: Feminist Legal Narra(c)tors, From Arendt to Women’s Courts), funded by the European Horizon Europe programme, which investigates the role of women’s courts in the history of feminist movements and in the transformation of legal imagination.
The podcast traces the origins of women’s courts, beginning with the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women, held in Brussels in March 1976. The initiative arose in the context of the International Women’s Year proclaimed by the United Nations in 1975, when feminist activists decided to create an autonomous space to denounce violence, discrimination and oppression that official law often ignored. More than two thousand women from around forty countries took part in the tribunal, sharing first-hand accounts of the injustices they had suffered.
At the heart of the women’s courts experience lay two innovative elements:
- The first was the Ethics of Testimony: women recounted their own experiences of violence or discrimination in their own words, transforming individual accounts into a form of political and collective knowledge.
- The second concerned the Rewriting of Rights: feminist courts redefined traditional legal categories, introducing new terms to describe the injustices suffered by women, such as ‘forced motherhood’, ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ or ‘economic crimes against women’.
Fifty years on from the first tribunal in Brussels, the project invites reflection on the legacy of these experiences and their relevance to the contemporary debate on women’s rights and feminist justice.
For further information: https://safi-network.org/blog/fifty-years-of-womens-courts/? fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQKNjYyODU2ODM3OQABHkgsaVfDejAnL3SaPOPIpiRB3HKZYSo0JNpceVfoFdVBFd4zQe2CjMWLggQn_aem_7pJEl7yeC7YqBR RaEb-xKA
Link to the podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1LzZPV0memoHrKK2V3ALiz?si=pIyB6XFXSOitpqe5ghS2ZA&nd=1&dlsi=fc6faa70272e4814