2025 Legal Updater
2025 Legal Update
The legal updaters are a period review series of developments in international law related to gender-based violence against women, written by Lisa Gormley.
It has been an exciting time reviewing all the jurisprudence of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (the CEDAW Committee) and where possible, expanding the research into the work of other UN human rights treaty monitoring bodies and regional human rights courts. The support of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust has enabled me to look back as far as 2020 right to the present day in Autumn 2025.
What I have seen in the jurisprudence is a steady development of a strong line of cases identifying conflict-related sexual violence as forms of torture – for crimes as far back as World War II (Alonzo et al v Philippines) and the war in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s (SH v Bosnia). The CEDAW Committee has been firm that there is an inextinguishable right to reparation for survivors of these torture crimes.
Similarly, sexual harassment by male prison guards, including spying on women prisoners while naked or using the toilet, has been identified as torture or ill-treatment (ED and MD v Belarus) and as well as a breach of the Bangkok Rules and the Mandela Rules on prison conditions.
A deeper and more nuanced understanding of how intersecting forms of discrimination compound the experiences of women and girls when their human rights are violated.
In the case of Khanum Jeiranova v Georgia, the minority Azeri woman who tried to get help from the Georgian police when her family threatened to kill her for reasons of so-called honour, was unable to communicate effectively with the police because she could only speak Azeri. Therefore, they permitted her to return to her family home where she died the next day. The family allege that she killed herself, but the police did not investigate effectively, so what happened is unclear.
Women human rights defenders also face intersecting forms discrimination. For example, in Libya, even supporting women’s human rights and freedoms is portrayed by state agents as contrary to their culture and worthy of gendered insults such as “a bitch” and “a whore” and death threats (Magdulein Abaida v Libya (12 April 2021) CEDAW/C/78/D/130/2018).
The CEDAW Committee has also identified that lesbian women face compounded discrimination because of their sexual orientation: that lesbian human rights defenders face particular risks to their safety and access to justice because of the criminalisation of same-sex intimacy (Rosanna Flamer-Caldera v Sri Lanka) and because the police purposefully do not investigate homophobic violence because they share the discriminatory attitudes of the perpetrators, and the law does not specify that homophobic violence is an aggravated offence (O.N. and D.P. v Russia (3 April 2020) CEDAW/C/75/D/119/2017) (K.K v Russia (8 April 2019) CEDAW/C/72/D/98/2016).
The experience of girls who are children under 18 has also been investigated as a matter of intersecting forms of discrimination. The Human Rights Committee (which monitors the implementation of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights) has given judgments in the case of four adolescent girls who because pregnant following rape and were denied access to the abortions they needed to have to preserve their physical health and bring an end to mental torture they faced at being in the impossible situation of carrying and giving birth to their rapist’s child, and losing all their opportunities for education and following their life-plans. See also: Sandra Luz Román Jaimes v Mexico (24 October 2022) CEDAW Committee CEDAW/C/83/D/153/2020) where a girl of 16 was in an intimate relationship with a police officer, became pregnant and then was “disappeared.”
Alongside these cases on denials of reproductive rights, the experiences of Indigenous women being forcibly sterilized in the 1990s was also recognised as a form of torture. The CEDAW Committee confirmed its finding in General Recommendation 35, paragraph 18, that “violations of women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights, such as forced sterilization, are forms of gender-based violence that may constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” – (paragraph 8.3) Like other gendered torture crimes, for example, conflict-related rape, those women who were forcibly sterilized were recognised as being entitled to complete reparation, even when the crimes were committed decades ago.
One issue which is a positive matter of procedure is that some cases at the CEDAW Committee and the European Court of Human Rights considered whether a state had discharged its duties to protect women and their children known to be at risk in situations of domestic violence by referring to checklists and risk assessment processes created in consultation with civil society. (Kurt v Austria, Malagic v Croatia) This is promising because it indicates that state officials are being trained, learning and being held accountable to standards based on the expertise of civil society and their years of experience accompanying women in danger and responding to their needs. As living instruments, the CEDAW Convention (particularly its General Recommendations 19 and 35) and specific treaties such as the “Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence” (known as the Istanbul Convention) have developed a shared understanding of good practice. Horrible cases, such as the death of the child in Kurt v Austria, become ultimately a moment to review and amend the guidance and learn from tragedies to avoid similar situations in future.
One issue which is less positive but deserves to be a teachable moment is the frequent appearance in the cases of police officers being perpetrators, and using their position of power to inflict gender-based violence against women – and girls (Sandra Luz Román Jaimes v Mexico (24 October 2022) CEDAW Committee CEDAW/C/83/D/153/2020) who were their intimate partners (Malagic v Croatia). In another case (A.F. v Italy) the perpetrator abused his position of trust as a police officer investigating crime to gain access to a woman’s home and to rape her. This may well indicate that training of police, not just in the detail of their professional practice, but also the place of abuse of official position in what are deemed to be “intimate” relationships.
In conclusion, the cases which have been decided over the last five years since the last updater have been important in that they maintain the outline of the CEDAW Committee’s General Recommendations 19 (1992) and 35 (2017) but the scripts play out with more detail and more colour. The detail of women’s and girls’ lives and the injustices they experience are recognized in the cases and the international human rights law provides a measure of how and why the violations of rights take place, and what could have been done to prevent them. Similarly, the participation of survivors and advocates in the international and regional cases provides detail and colour to the design of reparation that could transform their experience of injustice so that others can follow their path.
Lisa Gormley, September 2025