Roma women before the European Court of Human Rights: a missed opportunity to deliver justice

• Department of Law

This event features a discussion with EUI Fernand Braudel Fellow Emanuela Ignatoiu-Sora.

Starting with Buckley v. the United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights has been at the forefront of delivering judgments on Roma rights. Although many of the applicants were women, the Strasbourg court generally displayed a blind spot to gender in relation to Roma applicants. The forced sterilisation cases, such as V.C. v. Slovakia, could have become a turning point towards acknowledging and securing Roma women’s rights, but the case actually reconfirmed the invisibility of Roma women before the ECtHR. In fact, although the Court found a violation of the applicant’s rights, it failed to recognise that Roma women had been overwhelmingly targeted and impacted by the practice of forced sterilisation. In this paper, the speaker explores possible explanations for this lack of visibility, while also assessing its impact on Roma women’s access to justice. Her main argument is that gender-blind justice is not only insufficient, but it actually adds another level of injustice for the victims. In her analysis, she will point to the weak protection of gender equality under Article 14 of the Convention, as well as to the limited recognition of women’s rights under the European Court of Human Rights. She will conclude by advancing intersectionality as a venue for circumventing the Court’s limitations towards recognising and denouncing systemic discrimination affecting women.

Speaker:

Emanuela Ignatoiu-Sora is currently a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute. She is an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Bucharest (Faculty of Political Sciences). Her areas of expertise are human rights law, equality and non-discrimination, gender and climate justice.