Workshop on Gender Equality in judicial proceedings

On June 9th 2017, Academy of Justice with the support of the GIZ Legal and Administrative Reform Project, conducted workshop on the top-ic of Gender equality in judicial proceedings.

Purpose of this workshop was to jointly discuss the judges and prosecutors needs in state level pertaining to capacity increase on handling the gender equality related cases.

This workshop enabled analysis of the challeng-es for implementing the gender quality legisla-tion, the system deficiencies, cases that most frequently face gender discrimination, judgment practices in courts and prosecutions of Kosovo, as well as other specifics of the procedure.

The results of the group work in cases of domes-tic violence presented the following issues: in-sufficient reasoning of judgments, discrepancies between protection orders, needs for emergency treatment, supervision of implementation of the measures, and applicability in the procedure, decent representation as well as institutional co-operation. The working group on marriage dis-putes presented the inadequate assistance of the Social Welfare Centers, economic conditions, portioning of the common property, adequate assessment of the spouses contribution, distin-guishing the individual property from the com-mon property of spouses, availability of the en-tire property to men, and other issues; it was al-so discussed about gender discrimination in work related disputes.

From all the identified problems, the following needs were raised: need for joint roundtables of judges, prosecutors and all the stakeholders, in-cluding the victim defenders, investigation po-lice, profiled professionals, assigning judges for domestic violence cases, empowering the free legal aid, establishment of contact groups, and other specialized trainings on trial advocacy skills and judgment reasoning based on the trial areas.

Consequently, participants agreed that a certain number of judges, prosecutors and other stake-holders that are involved in these procedures cooperate to analyze the court judgments upon which they make a needs assessment on what shall a training module on gender equality in-clude.Participants of this workshop were judges, pros-ecutors, investigation police, and representatives from the Ombudsperson, as well as from the