Seminar on women and penal justice: Participants called for courts specialized in crimes against women
The Regional Human Rights Commission of Fez-Meknes and the Dignity Coalition, represented by the Initiatives to Protect Women’s Rights Association, held a regional seminar on the challenges to women and penal justice, on the 31st of October in Fez.
This seminar was an opportunity to enrich national debate on the penal system, discuss the shortcomings that prevent access of women victims of violence to justice and shed light on the CNDH and the Coalition’s vision to fair penal justice for women.
Two roundtable discussions were scheduled for this seminar: the penal system through the surveys and researches of the Dignity Coalition and the penal legislation reform from a gender approach perspective, in addition to several workshops on the penal code and the law on violence against women.
The participants made several proposals and recommendations to honor women’s rights and improve their access to justice: including women’s rights as they are universally recognized in the preamble of the penal code, adopting legal provisions to fight gender-based violence, criminalizing violations to women’s rights, strengthening judicial services targeting women, mainly those who do not speak Arabic, improving access of women to justice and providing for courts specialized only in crimes against women, flexibility in proving violence against women, etc.