UN Women reiterates its commitment to guarantee women access to justice during the AIAMP meeting
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Cecilia Alemany, Deputy Director of the Regional Office of UN Women for the Americas, highlighted the difficulties that women face during the pandemic in accessing justice and reaffirmed the commitment of UN Women to strengthen regional capacities in this area, during a meeting of the Specialized Network on Gender (REG) of the Ibero-American Association of Public Ministries (AIAMP), on September 17th.
During this meeting, within the framework of its regional work agenda, the transfer of the coordination of the REG from the Public Ministry of Guatemala to the Public Prosecutor's Office of Argentina was officialized.
In addition to UN Women’s deputy director, Lucrecia Vásquez, Secretary for Women of the Public Ministry of Guatemala; the attorney general and head of the Public Ministry of Guatemala, María Consuelo Porras Argueta; Eduardo Ezequiel Casal, General Prosecutor (interim) of Argentina and the coordinator of the EUROsociAL + Gender Area, Dominique de Suremain, attended the event.
"There are still plenty of women who do not have access to connectivity and in that, we must work in a network and jointly," said the deputy director of UN Women. In this line, Alemany highlighted the automatic extensions that occurred in the precautionary measures in cases of gender violence in several countries and called for considering how the structural barriers that condition women's access to justice deepen amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
Within the framework of the Spotlight Initiative, UN Women together with EUROsociAL+ and AIAMAP is advancing a regional document that will analyze the impact of COVID-19 on the work of prosecutors on VAWG+FF and will include recommendations addressed to the members of the Public Ministry to treat VAWG + FF cases in the new normal.
In the same way, UN Women works, jointly with UNDP and AIAMP, to analyze the obstacles and challenges for prosecutors to investigate femicides in the context of organized crime. To this end, a survey will be conducted for the Public Ministries of the region. The systematization of the survey will complement the baseline study and will be an input for the discussions that will take place in the virtual meetings and/or the face-to-face meeting of the AIAMP Specialized Gender Network.
Also, a monitoring platform is being developed for the application of the Latin American Model Protocol for investigating the violent deaths of women for reasons of gender (femicide / feminicide), which includes a questionnaire addressed to the members of the REG of the AIAMP.
UN Women has supported the current AIAMP Gender Specialized Network since its inception, as well as the former Gender Specialized Group, whose mandate was two years from which the creation of the Network was approved.