A/HRC/14/22
which they are subjected in the post-conflict scenario. Even in non-conflict scenarios, acts
of violence against women are part of a larger system of gender hierarchy that can only be
fully grasped when seen in the broader structural context. Therefore, adequate reparations
for women cannot simply be about returning them to where they were before the individual
instance of violence, but instead should strive to have a transformative potential.
Reparations should aspire, to the extent possible, to subvert, instead of reinforce, preexisting structural inequality that may be at the root causes of the violence the women
experience before, during and after the conflict.
32.
Women-centred processes of reparations require participation of women in the
process of shaping, implementing, monitoring and evaluating reparations programmes;
design of a reparations procedure that renders it accessible to all women and girls;
investigation of facts to determine whether certain violations of rights have taken place and
making sure that those violations that target women and girls have been duly included;
determination of harms, including those which are gender-specific or have a differential
impact on women and girls; identification of responsibility for the violation, including by
omission, and by those perpetrators that target women and girls; and determination of
measures of redress aimed at returning the victim to where she was before the violation
took place, except for when those measures may in themselves be discriminatory or fail to
address the structural roots underlying the violence.
B.
Reparations for women subjected to violence in countries coming out of
widespread conflict or authoritarian repression
33.
Women and girls are victimized under authoritarian regimes and during violent
conflict in multiple ways. They suffer from operations randomly or strategically targeting
and terrorizing the civilian population, but also from summary and extrajudicial executions,
imprisonment, torture, rape and sexual mutilations for fighting in resistance movements,
engaging in the search for and defence of their loved ones or for coming from communities
suspected of collaboration. Women and children represent the majority of the forcefully
displaced in internal and international armed conflicts. Women can suffer the consequences
of violent actions that target “their” men (husbands, sons, brothers, etc.), for example, when
they become the sole breadwinners and protectors of their families. Some forms of violence
that women are subject to are similar to those suffered by men; others are more specific to
women and girls, subjecting them to systematic patterns of sexual or reproductive violence
or to different forms of domestic enslavement. In some settings, certain crimes tend to be
perpetrated mostly by State forces while others are used mostly by non-State armed groups
or self-defence groups as tools to recruit and instrumentalize women. More importantly,
even when women are subjected to the same violations as men, their pre-existing socioeconomic and legal status and the cultural meanings surrounding the construction of the
male and the female in patriarchal societies may cause different ensuing harms for men and
women.
1.
Procedural considerations: reaching women
34.
Women’s access to meaningful reparations may depend more on the procedural
hurdles they may encounter than on the content of reparation measures. National and
international judicial institutions constitute the standard arena for remedial claims in
societies dealing with both past and present violations. Such judicial institutions are
normally motivated by the goal of providing victims with compensation in proportion to
harm and are important because they can also catalyse the willingness of otherwise reticent
Governments to establish massive reparations programmes.
GE.10-13109
11
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