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Courting Gender Justice explores the obstacles that confront citizens, activists, and lawyers who try to bring gender discrimination cases to court. Drawing comparisons among forms of discrimination faced by women and LGBT people in Russia and Turkey, the book offers interviews with human rights and feminist activists and lawyers, grounding the law in the personal experiences of individual people fighting to defend their rights.
List of contents
- Table of Cases: European Court of Human Rights
- Note on Transliteration
- Chapter 1: Gender Discrimination Cases at the European Court of Human Rights: Why So Few?
- Chapter 2: What Gender Discrimination? Psychological and Socio-Cultural Barriers
- Chapter 3: Police, Prosecutors, and Ping-Pong: Legal Barriers
- Chapter 4: Whose Rights are Human Rights? The Gender Gap Between Russian Feminist, LGBT, and Human Rights Networks
- Chapter 5: International Obstacles to Russian Gender Discrimination Cases at the European Court of Human Rights
- Chapter 6: Turkish Gender Discrimination Cases in Domestic and International Courts
- Chapter 7: Conclusion
- References
- Appendix: Interviews
- Index
About the author
Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia.
Valerie Sperling is Professor of Political Science at Clark University.
Melike Sayoglu is a Ph.D. Candidate at Clark University.
Summary
Women and the LGBT community in Russia and Turkey face pervasive discrimination. Only a small percentage dare to challenge their mistreatment in court. Facing domestic police and judges who often refuse to recognize discrimination, a small minority of activists have exhausted their domestic appeals and then turned to their last hope: the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The ECtHR, located in Strasbourg, France, is widely regarded as the most effective international human rights court in existence. Russian citizens whose rights have been violated at home have brought tens of thousands of cases to the ECtHR over the past two decades. But only one of these cases resulted in a finding of gender discrimination by the ECtHR-and that case was brought by a man. By comparison, the Court has found gender discrimination more frequently in decisions on Turkish cases. Courting Gender Justice explores the obstacles that confront citizens, activists, and lawyers who try to bring gender discrimination cases to court. To shed light on the factors that make rare victories possible in discrimination cases, the book draws comparisons among forms of discrimination faced by women and LGBT people in Russia and Turkey. Based on interviews with human rights and feminist activists and lawyers in Russia and Turkey, this engaging book grounds the law in the personal experiences of individual people fighting to defend their rights.
Additional text
An authoritative, rich, and vivid account of the challenges to fighting gender discrimination in Russian courts and in the European Court of Human Rights. The authors lay out the long and difficult trajectory that awaits gender discrimination cases as they wend their way through Russian courts and occasionally to the ECtHR- whose judges have also been reluctant to confront the issue-and make deft use of comparisons, both with Russian litigation on LGBT cases, and LGBT and gender discrimination cases from Turkey. The result is impressive indeed.
