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Tunisia’s long haul to stop violence against women reached international recognition

In April, the Council of Europe asked Tunisia to sign the Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women – as the first country in the MENA region.

The invitation, which still needs to be answered by the Tunisian government, is a clear recognition of the real progress made in Tunisia in recent years to improve legislation to protect women against violence – and not least to the important role played by Tunisian civil society in the process.

Tunisian civil society organisations celebrated the victory – and with reason – when the ground-breaking Loi integrale was passed in August 2017. The Law finally repealed the provision in Tunisian Law that allowed a rapist to escape punishment if he married his victim. This, and many other protection and prevention measures of the Loi integrale, significantly improved the legal protection of women and girls in Tunisia. Is the first national Tunisian law to expressly address violence against women in multiple forms – physical, sexual, psychological, and economic – and, moreover, was the first such comprehensive law in the entire MENA region.

“As discrimination is the main cause of violence against women, we wanted to change all laws which instituted a form of discrimination”, recalls Monia Ben Jemia, then president of the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (ATFD). She was one of the forerunners of the coalition of more than 50 Tunisian civil society organisations that fought for a Loi integrale that would make real change for women in Tunisia.

A detour via Istanbul
The approval of the Loi integrale was a significant step towards overruling the discrimination against women in other Tunisian laws and it is a key reason why the Council of Europe earlier this year invited Tunisia to sign and ratify the Istanbul Convention.

The Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention is the perhaps best international and legally binding instrument that exists to prevent violence against women. It is, upon invitation, open to ratification by third countries and can thus help to rectify flaws in existing national laws and effectively follow up on their implementation through an inherent monitoring mechanism.

EuroMed Rights trained Tunisian organisations on how to use the Istanbul Convention as an advocacy tool and it became a source of great inspiration and a tangible tool to the coalition of the 50 civil society organisations involved in the making of the Loi Integrale. If Tunisia now proceeds to ratifying the Convention, it will be an even more important tool for civil society to help insure that discriminatory provisions in many other laws are repealed, as underlined by Monia Ben Jemia above, and to ensure the actual implementation of the Law on the ground.

Not without civil society
The 50 Tunisian civil society organisations involved in the coalition were instrumental in influencing the formulations and provisions of the Loi Integrale through numerous consultations and joint recommendations. These recommendations were taken into account by the lawmakers to an unusually high extent.

It all started when Monia Ben Jamia presented a fact sheet on the state of violence against women to an Expert Committee tasked with drafting a provisional Tunisian law on combatting violence against women back in 2015. The Tunisian Association of Democratic Women had developed the fact sheet, based on the Istanbul Convention, together with EuroMed Rights’ regional working group on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality. After this, the coalition of the 50 organisations was then set up to prepare an advocacy strategy to ensure that the draft law would pass in parliament. The fact sheet was similarly used in meetings with the Tunisian authorities to document challenges to gender equality and women’s rights and formed the basis of a visibility and capacity building campaign targeting the EU Delegation in Tunisia.

The focus of the campaign in Tunisia was on improving, passing and enacting the comprehensive law on violence against women. Monia Ben Jamia explains that a first a proposition for legislative reform had been rejected, while the second proposal, which focused exclusively on violence against women as contained in the Istanbul Convention was successful. Later, a panel of experts, which included female activists from the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women, was appointed and quickly noticed gaps in the draft law relative to the standards set by the Istanbul Convention. They then lobbied to include certain missing provisions that in the end made the Loi integrale a Law worthy of celebration in a feminist perspective.

How to put a law into practise
Tunisian civil society did, however, not stop when the Law was passed. If Tunisian women were benefit from the Law in real life, the changes needed had only just begun. Legal experts, like clerks, lawyers and judges needed to be equipped to interpret the new texts. To address this need, EuroMed Rights and Tunisian civil society organisations engaged in a partnership with the Tunisian Association of Magistrates to produce a gender training guide offering explanations of the legal text as well as good practices and concrete illustrations. 30 legal experts (clerks, prosecutors, judges) were consulted in the making of the guide. The joint work done by legal professionals and civil society actors helped produce a guide based on real examples met by the organisations and made it possible to distribute it around the country. Between 2018 and 2019, the partners organised several meetings to present the guide, how it was conceived and its usefulness when judging real-life cases.

The next step planned to ensure that Loi integrale is well known and implemented on the ground is to train front-line police officers on how to put the Law into practise in their daily job.

Teamwork makes the dreamwork

Democratic gains require the setting-up of strong bonds between stakeholders but also compromises and discussions to reach consensus.

Civil society platforms such as EuroMed Rights have a direct role to play in this regard. By bringing together NGOs and associations, they create the necessary conditions for exchanges and help build trust between partners. In this case, the mobilisation of all actors, at all stages of the process, helped bring direct changes to the daily lives of Tunisian women.

This dynamic evolved from the regional perspective applied by EuroMed Rights. Violence against women is a problem that pervades all borders and women’s rights organisations from North to South of the Euro-Mediterranean region have benefitted from addressing it jointly or exchanging on their experiences of it with the common tool and reference point that the Istanbul Convention offers.

Tunisian women’s rights organisations brought this knowledge and inspiration back and applied it in their national context and their experience has since then inspired and guided their peers in other countries. A similar initiative was taken up by EuroMed Rights and its partners in Morocco, but the Law that was passed in Morocco in 2018 was disappointingly less ground-breaking than the Tunisian one. The Moroccan women’s rights organisations did however not give up and keep working to improve it. Latest, in 2019, a group of Algerian women’s rights organisations, initiated by an Algerian EuroMed rights member, asked EuroMed Rights for a training on the Istanbul Convention and subsequently they decided to establish an Algerian working group to advocate for legal reform on the issue in Algeria.