Gender equality courses for judiciary as a tool to enhance access to justice

Abstract

The article discusses how to design and deliver gender equality training for judges to boost their gender awareness and ensure gender-sensitive justice. In recognizing how specific the judicial training is, the article suggests an approach to using multiple methods in well-designed, holistic yet adaptable combination, taking account of the judicial skills, to make a value-shift transformation. The first part of this article provides contextual background for judicial training on gender equality and sets out some of the common features all gender equality courses for the judiciary to possess. The author accented that gender equality courses for judiciary have to address such challenges as to overcome prejudiced (either skeptical or even aggressive) perception of the gender related issues as the consequence of strong anti-gender movements as a part of Russian propaganda, to deal with the invisibility of the gender inequality, to demonstrate gender sensitive situations and cases in courts and the practical application of the gender (in)equality in judicial work. Therefore, the course design requires combination of the content (“what”), methodological approaches (“how”) and performance/ delivery (“who”), considering also “in what context”. The second part of the article highlights some specificities of each of four gender equality target-oriented courses designed for different target groups within judiciary, namely sitting judges, court presidents, judges-trainers, and judges-to-be (so called “candidates for the position of judge”). Finally, the author elaborates the idea of importance of carrying out gender awareness raising among judiciary, aimed, inter alia, at countering gender stereotypes and gender bias, as well as enabling judges to see gender inequality, through displaying situations and cases using gender-sensitive pedagogical tools. Thus, integrating a gender perspective into judicial training would eventually contribute to countering gender discrimination and could serve as practical tools to enhance access to justice.