The public prosecutors of 14 Latin American countries met in Guatemala to draw up a draft five-year Plan of Work for the Specialist Group on Gender Issues of the AIAMP (2018-2022)
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The 2nd Workshop of the Specialist Group on Gender Issues (GEG) of the Ibero-American Association of Public Prosecutors (AIAMP) took place in Guatemala City on 20, 21 and 22 March 2018. This initiative, sponsored by EUROsociAL+, brought together representatives of the Public Prosecutor’s offices of 14 countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Portugal and Uruguay) as well as UN Women, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the experts Edith López and Françoise Roth.
The GEG, coordinated by Guatemala and endorsed by the XXIVth regular General Assembly of the AIAMP (Lisbon, October 2016) seeks to incorporate a gender perspective into the AIAMP and to devise tools enabling the institutions responsible for criminal investigation and prosecution to respond appropriately from the gender perspective. In spite of the progress achieved in the area of women’s human rights and the mechanisms put in place to secure them, the adoption by the public prosecutor’s offices of the cross-cutting gender perspective is crucial to making progress in this area.
The overall objective of this second workshop was to provide a space for exchanging ideas on the development of tools to boost the efforts of the various public prosecutor’s offices in the region in handling and investigating crimes of gender-based violence, and to agree on a proposed five-year work plan for the GEG (2018 – 2022).
During the first day’s session, following the inaugural ceremony, Mar Merita Blat, the senior expert in Gender Issues for EUROsociAL+, presented an analysis of the “Regional Protocol for the investigation from a gender perspective of crimes against women committed in domestic settings”, with the aim of finding pathways for its harmonisation with CEDAW and the Belém do Pará Convention. For her part, Edith López, the EUROsociAL+ expert, spoke about her report examining good practice in criminal investigation and prosecution from a gender perspective at the Latin American level, and this sparked off a debate around the question of institutionalising these good practices and establishing a baseline for preparing the Plan. In addition, Françoise Roth, the expert from UN Women, spoke about the ongoing activities relating to the national application of the Latin American Model Protocol for investigating violent deaths of women for gender reasons (femicide/feminicide).
Then each of the delegations described the situation in their countries concerning the crime of violence towards women – the legal framework, victim care models, criminal investigation tools and quantitative data. The purpose of this section was to enable the delegations to present their initiatives in the light of two diagnostic reports supported by EUROsociAL+ on good practice in criminal investigation and prosecution from a gender perspective in Latin America, and on good practice in legislation, public policy and judicial decisions from a gender perspective, also at the Latin American level.
The third workshop day focused on the drafting of the Five-Year Work Plan for the GEG (2018-2022). For this purpose, the delegations from the various public prosecutor’s offices worked in groups, with Edith López playing a coordinating role. This Five-Year Plan is structured around three themes: preventing gender-based crime, investigating, prosecuting and punishing gender-based crime and transformative reparation, with the gender perspective being mainstreamed in public prosecutor’s offices and within the AIAMP. Each theme is broken down into specific lines of action, together with a proposed set of quantitative indicators for results.
The 3rd GEG Workshop, to be held in autumn 2018, will review and build upon the Regional Protocol for the investigation from a gender perspective of crimes against women committed in domestic settings. Experiences of its adaptation to a national framework were described by the Argentinian and Guatemalan delegations.
The proposed Five-Year Work Plan will itself be submitted for approval to the next General Assembly.
Área de políticas de Equidad e Igualdad de Género, Expertise France / Gender Fairness and Equality Policies, Expertise France. EUROsociAL+