Righting Wrongs: Global Justice for Gender Violence

The project focuses on addressing core gaps in women’s protection from violence—antiquated laws, indifference to crimes against women, and restrictive policies on services needed only by women—to advance legal frameworks that ensure women’s health, dignity, and agency.

GJC uses international law and human rights standards to combat violence against women, ensure access to justice, and strengthen services offered to survivors.

In Burma, where the penal code dates from 1860, GJC is working with policymakers and women’s rights activists to pass a comprehensive violence against women law. In Iraq and Syria, GJC is taking action to ensure that the horrific sexual and gender-based violence crimes committed by ISIS against the Yazidi are prosecuted as the crimes they are: war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Internationally, GJC is leading a campaign to have abortion recognized as protected and necessary medical care for women who are raped in war.

GJC was founded in 2005 to develop innovative legal strategies that expand and enforce international human rights laws protecting women. GJC brings women’s equality guarantees from paper to practice – striving to establish international law precedents that are permanent and progressive.

Our theory of change is premised on three precepts: (1) gender parity in power and under the law is essential to global security, justice, and prosperity for all; (2) discriminatory political and legal systems that fail to enforce human rights or ensure equal protection to women must be challenged; and (3) progressive interpretation and enforcement of international law is a powerful catalyst for social and structural change, and is necessary to establish a global rule of law.

Using these principles to guide our programmatic work and strategies, GJC’s lawyers use international law as a tool to turn human rights commitments into enforceable legal guarantees of gender equality. We develop new legal arguments to make international law work for women. GJC fills a needed niche in the human rights field by developing creative strategies and using international law to respond to human rights violations that other organizations have documented. We provide our global partners with strategies and tactics for addressing injustices in real time, and we look to the future by identifying opportunities for change.

Vision

Blueprints for Gender Justice

With increased resources GJC would scale our projects to engage with new populations and geographies. We would use our work in the Middle-East and Burma as models to address gender-based violence in other contexts and countries. We would also bring our advocacy on abortion to the local level, ensuring that our international progress is carried out on the ground.

Global Justice Center

Righting Wrongs: Global Justice for Gender Violence

Model and Strategy

Impact

Leadership

Janet Benshoof