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

Select target paragraph3

Connect to a paragraph
Connect to an entity
Disable highlights
Add to table of contents