What happens when judges rewrite the law through a feminist lens?
The Feminist Judgments Project–CEE (FJP-CEE), part of the EUI Widening Europe Programme’s collaborative research projects, addresses timely challenges to gender equality by reimagining judicial reasoning through an intersectional feminist lens and by forging new alliances among scholars, practitioners, and activists across the targeted countries. To better understand the project’s aims, challenges, and key outcomes, we spoke with its coordinators, EUI Professor Silvia Suteu and Ivana Krstić (University of Belgrade).
In this interview, they reflect on the academic and political pressures surrounding feminist legal work in Central and Eastern Europe, explain how feminist methodologies can reshape legal interpretation and legal education, and highlight the importance of transnational cooperation in resisting gendered democratic backsliding. They also discuss how the project’s rewritten judgments can function as practical tools for lawyers and activists engaged in advocacy for gender equality.
Which gender equality challenges in the region does the FJP-CEE project primarily seek to address?
From the very beginning of our project, we knew that engaging in research that is explicitly feminist would carry with it perceptions of bias and unseriousness. This is part of the course for feminist scholars, in particular those in law, but our regional context added another layer: Attacks on gender studies and so-called ‘gender ideology’ have persistently been the background against which we have developed our work. This has meant that, at least for some of our colleagues, their very involvement in our project was an act of academic bravery.
In addition, we knew that the relatively underdeveloped body of feminist legal research in many countries in Central and Eastern Europe meant that we would have our work cut out for us. This has been a challenge but also an opportunity to help shape the field and foster a regional conversation that occurs too rarely.
Last but not least, we have had to deal with ‘standard’ challenges faced by more critical legal research in CEE: typically, a rather formalistic, positivist, and rigid understanding of the role of the law and of the judge in our chosen jurisdictions, and a formal conception of equality that resists more transformative interpretations.
How does looking at court decisions through a feminist perspective change the way laws are interpreted and taught in the targeted countries?
Legal education in Central and Eastern Europe remains focused on formal concepts and a largely doctrinal approach to legal interpretation. While this is gradually changing, it remains the dominant ‘tradition’ within which law students and later magistrates are trained. This renders them less open not just to feminist methods and arguments, but to more critical approaches in general.
We hope that, through our theoretically-informed applied work on rewriting judgments, we demonstrate that revealing and interrogating the unequal power structures supporting the law and its interpretation is still ‘doing law’. In fact, it is a way to more fully understand law as a social construct and practice and not as a self-contained field. To put it differently, we see our project as one harnessing the radical potential of law to bring about gender justice.
How can cooperation among researchers, judges, civil society, and international organisations strengthen efforts to push back against the gender-related democratic backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe?
The attacks on gender equality protections in Central and Eastern Europe have been varied, concerted, and unfortunately very effective. The collaborative nature of our project has permitted us to piece together the myriad strategies used by those engaging in undermining gender equality and to reveal the interlinkages between them.
For example, our project purposefully adopts an inclusive understanding of gender equality and our rewritten judgments cover women’s rights, transgender and LGBTQI+ rights. This is because the gendered backsliding we have witnessed in the region has been underpinned by common bogeymen: the so-called ‘gender ideology’ said to have been imported from the West; the disestablishment of traditional gender roles and the erosion of the so-called ‘traditional’ family; demographic decline and anti-immigrant sentiment etc. These connections became evident in our group conversations, which also revealed the strong transnational mobilisation behind the recent gender discourse in the region.
Our project also reached out to judges at the national and supranational (ECtHR) level, inviting them to share their own experiences in judging cases in this area. They enriched our understanding of the numerous challenges faced by a judge – even one who openly identifies as feminist – seeking to deliver justice in the case before her during times of heightened contestation of basic equality and rule of law norms.
We also presented our work to the members of the UN Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls at their regional meeting in Belgrade (October 2025) and found commonality in our focus and approaches. They, too, have been navigating ever more uncertain waters in trying to defend gender equality as a norm of an increasingly contested body of international human rights law.
To what extent can the feminist judgments produced by FJP-CEE serve as practical tools for legal practitioners and activists engaged in litigation and advocacy against gendered backsliding?
We strongly believe in the educational potential of our project, both for students (primarily in law, but also in related fields such as politics, sociology, etc.) and for legal scholars and practitioners. We envision our outputs to be used in the classroom in the teaching of subjects such as constitutional, criminal, and administrative law. The rewritten judgements we have produced are written in an accessible language and are accompanied by a critical discussion of the original case’s context and outcome. They illustrate the very practical way in which feminist arguments can be translated into doctrinally sound decisions that, while operating under the same constraints as the original judges were under, nevertheless produce more egalitarian outcomes for the person and group at the heart of the case.
We also had civil society actors engaged in gender equality work and litigation in mind when developing our project, as we know that strategic litigation has increasingly been deployed as both a means of lawfare and of resistance to gendered backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe. So, our hope is that our project inspires and aids those seeking to advance gender equality from the bottom up, both in the courtroom and beyond.
Silvia Suteu joined the EUI as a Chair in Law in September 2024. Her research interests are comparative constitutional law, constitutional theory, and gender and law. She is especially interested in the theory and practice of deliberative constitutional change, constitutional entrenchment, democratic theory, transitional constitutionalism, and gender-sensitive constitution-making. She has also done work in international humanitarian and human rights law. Professor Suteu is currently involved in three major research projects. She leads the Feminist Judgments in Central and Eastern Europe Project, a seven-country collaboration among scholars rewriting key national judgments from a feminist perspective.
Ivana Krstić is an Associate Professor of International Human Rights Law and a Director of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law. She teaches several courses, including European Immigration Law and Policy, Refugee Law and Minority Rights. She is also a director of the specialist course on International Refugee Protection, delivered by the Faculty of Law and San Remo Institute for Humanitarian Law, with the support of UNHCR Serbia. As a leading Serbian expert in the area of human rights, she is engaged in many projects run by several international organisations and agencies.