Accelerating Efforts to Eliminate All Forms of Violence Against Women and Girls Preventing and Responding to All Forms of Violence Against Women and Girls in Criminal Justice Detention

A/HRC/RES/53/27View PDF

Who adopted this document and its mandates?

A Resolution of the Human Rights Council, under agenda item 3 Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development, published in 2023.

What subjects does this mandate have?

9 subjects

Administration of Justice Anti-Discrimination Measures Crime Prevention Criminal Justice Gender Discrimination Gender-Based Violence Girls Prisoner Treatment Women's Rights

What’s in this document?

31 operative paragraphs

Expresses outrage at and condemns in the strongest possible terms the persistence and pervasiveness of all forms of violence against women and girls worldwide, online, through or amplified by the use of digital technologies, and offline, and reaffirms the responsibility of States to protect women and girls from violence, including in criminal justice detention;

Expresses deep concern that all forms of discrimination and violence against women and girls impair or nullify the full enjoyment by women and girls of their human rights and fundamental freedoms, which hinder their full, effective and meaningful participation, inclusion and leadership in public and private life, and are an impediment to achieving gender equality, the empowerment of all women and girls and their full enjoyment of all their human rights;

Stresses the need to address multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination, which place women and girls at greater risk of exploitation, violence, abuse, harassment and neglect throughout their life course, and to implement measures to prevent and eliminate the stereotypes based on disability, gender, age, race and xenophobia, ableism, stigma, negative social norms, attitudes and behaviours that cause or perpetuate gender-based discrimination and violence against women and girls;

Also stresses that, by placing women and girls in criminal justice detention, States retain the obligation to respect, protect and fulfil all their human rights and respect their safety, dignity and privacy;

Calls upon States to take immediate and effective action to prevent and eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls in criminal justice detention by:

Ensuring promotion and protection of and respect for the dignity, integrity and bodily autonomy of women and girls in criminal justice detention, and that those in criminal justice detention enjoy all the human rights guaranteed by international law;

Adhering to measures that protect the safety, security and dignity of mothers in criminal justice detention, including pregnant women and girls, breastfeeding women and girls and mothers with children in detention, as outlined in the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders (the Bangkok Rules);

Promoting awareness-raising campaigns highlighting the link between violence and women’s and girls’ incarceration and the unacceptability of all forms of violence against women and girls in detention, and promoting and supporting campaigns and training for detention facility and criminal justice personnel that are aimed at correcting the false perception that violence against women and girls is acceptable in criminal justice detention facilities;

Reviewing, and repealing or adjusting as appropriate, all laws and policies that exclusively or disproportionately target or criminalize the actions or behaviour of women and girls and laws and policies that are discriminatory against them, including as a result of any custom, tradition or misuse of culture or religion, and creating accountability mechanisms to end impunity and prevent, eliminate and remedy any discriminatory application of the law;

Reviewing and, as appropriate, modifying all proposed and existing legislation, policies and programmes to align them with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, taking into account the Bangkok Rules and the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice (the Beijing Rules), and establishing clear policies and regulations on the conduct of criminal justice personnel, to protect women and girls from all forms of violence, promote children’s sense of dignity and worth and fully respect their age, stage of development and their ability to participate meaningfully in and contribute to society;

Reforming the use of pretrial detention to ensure that it is used as a means of last resort, as appropriate, given that women and girls are particularly at risk of experiencing sexual and gender-based violence in pretrial detention as a means of coercion with the purpose of extracting confessions;

Providing relevant, mandatory, recurrent and effective trauma-informed and victim- and survivor-centred education and training on preventing and eliminating all forms of violence against women and girls, including sexual and gender-based violence, and the absolute prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment for all police personnel, prison authorities, social workers, health-care providers and relevant staff working in criminal justice detention, including on international norms and standards, such as the Bangkok Rules, the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules) and the United Nations Model Strategies and Practical Measures on the Elimination of Violence against Children in the Field of Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice;

Diverting women and girls away from the criminal justice system, in appropriate cases, and towards gender- and age-responsive, disability-inclusive and trauma-informed services and programmes, with a focus on addressing the underlying causes leading to women’s and girls’ contact with the criminal justice system, and prioritizing and implementing gender- and age-responsive and disability-inclusive non-custodial measures, such as arbitrated settlements, restitution to the victims, community service orders, victim-offender mediation, family group conferences, sentencing circles, drug treatment programmes and other restorative justice processes, services and programmes, including those that respect Indigenous Peoples’ legal systems;

Reaffirming that women should, as far as possible, be detained in separate institutions, that, in an institution that receives both men and women, the whole premises allocated to women should be entirely separate, and that detainees who are children should be kept separate from adults, in accordance with international norms and standards;

Ensuring that there are adequately resourced independent, external monitoring bodies, which may include competent international, national or regional bodies, including those established under the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as well as inspectorates, supervisory bodies and internal inspection agencies central to the prison administration, to monitor the treatment and rights of women and girls in criminal justice detention, bearing in mind the Bangkok Rules and the Nelson Mandela Rules, and other relevant standards, and taking into account age and gender considerations;

Ensuring the full, effective and meaningful participation and inclusion of women and girls, including women and girls who have experienced criminal justice detention, in the development, implementation and monitoring of gender- and age-responsive and disability-inclusive national policies, legislation, procedures, action plans, programmes, projects and strategies to prevent and eliminate violence against women and girls, and taking steps to ensure that such participation is consistent and conducted in a safe and accessible environment, including through support and capacity-building from civil society actors and organizations advocating for and led by women and girls;

Supporting initiatives aimed at advancing gender equality, women’s participation in all public and private decision-making processes and inclusion and eliminating all forms of violence against women and girls that are undertaken by, inter alia, international and non-governmental organizations and civil society organizations, including organizations of and led by women and girls in or previously in criminal justice detention, as part of their efforts to develop targeted and gender- and age-responsive and disability-inclusive programmes and policies, including by allocating adequate financial resources and providing them with access, including the ability to visit and observe criminal justice detention facilities;

Also calls upon States to take immediate and effective action to respond to all forms of violence against women and girls in detention and to support and protect all victims and survivors by:

Holding perpetrators, including those working in criminal justice detention facilities, to account, and eliminating impunity for all forms of violence against women and girls;

Ensuring that legislation and policies allow for the timely and effective investigation, prosecution, including ex officio prosecution, sanction and effective redress of violence against women and girls;

Adopting, strengthening and implementing legislation and policies that expressly prohibit violence, provide adequate protection for all women and girls in criminal justice detention against all forms of violence, end impunity and adequately penalize offences involving all forms of violence and discrimination carried out in criminal justice detention;

Ensuring equal access to justice and accountability mechanisms for the effective implementation and enforcement of laws and policies aimed at preventing and eliminating all forms of violence and discrimination against women and girls, including by informing women and girls about their rights under relevant laws and policies in accessible formats, including plain language format, including the ability to complain, establishing clear reporting and independent and confidential complaint procedures, such as an inclusive external oversight mechanism, putting in place protection measures that account for risks of retaliation and creating a culture of accountability in criminal justice detention facilities and timely and effective remedies;

Investigating promptly, effectively and impartially all allegations of violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, independently initiating an investigation wherever there are reasonable grounds to believe that such an act could have been committed, and holding responsible, bringing to justice and punishing those who encourage, instigate, order, tolerate, acquiesce in, consent to or perpetrate such acts, including officials in charge of places of criminal justice detention where the prohibited act is found to have been committed;

Providing victims and survivors of violence with effective remedies, including victim- and survivor-centred legal, medical, psychological and confidential counselling services and legal protection that avoid secondary victimization and retraumatization, including legal remedies in cases of inappropriate arrest to shield or clear their criminal records, providing inclusive support services, information and education in accessible formats using plain language, including on how to prevent, recognize and report instances of exploitation, including trafficking in persons, violence and abuse, encouraging and facilitating victims and survivors to report such crimes, ensuring that they do not face reprisals, and reporting any serious injury to a judicial or other competent authority that is independent of the criminal justice detention administration and mandated to conduct an investigation;

Respecting, protecting and fulfilling the right to sexual and reproductive health, including for women, girls, women and girls with disabilities, and pregnant and breastfeeding women and girls in criminal justice detention, free from discrimination, coercion and violence, and addressing the social and other determinants of health, removing legal barriers, developing and enforcing policies, good practices and legal frameworks that respect dignity, integrity and bodily autonomy and guarantee universal access to sexual and reproductive health services that are available, accessible, acceptable and of good quality and evidence-based information and education, including for menstrual health and family planning, and ensuring timely access to maternal health services and emergency obstetric care, including treatment for pregnancy-related morbidities, while being respectful of the principle of confidentiality;

Designing and implementing comprehensive mechanisms and tools that address and contribute to improving the mental health and well-being of all women and girls in criminal justice detention, including those with psychosocial disabilities, who are victims and survivors of gender-based violence;

Designing and implementing comprehensive pre- and post-release reintegration programmes, including Indigenous-planned and -led programmes, which take into account the gender- and age-specific needs of women and girls and provide quality education and vocational training, and utilizing options such as home leave and community-based programmes and services to the maximum extent possible to ease their transition from criminal justice detention to liberty, reduce stigma and discrimination and maintain relations with their families;

Strengthening or establishing systems to regularly collect, analyse and publish gender statistics and statistical data, disaggregated by sex, age, disability, race and other characteristics relevant to national contexts, on populations in criminal justice detention and all forms of violence against women and girls in criminal justice detention, including on complaints, investigations, prosecutions and convictions in cases of torture and ill-treatment, and using these data to inform more effective gender- and age-responsive and disability-inclusive policies and programmes across all sectors to prevent and respond to violence, while respecting human rights, transparency, accountability, privacy and participation;

Welcomes the annual full-day discussion on the human rights of women convened by the Human Rights Council, and requests the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to prepare a summary report, in accessible formats, including easy-to-read and plain language formats, on the annual discussions held at the present and fifty-sixth sessions, to present each report to the Council at its fifty-sixth and fifty-ninth sessions, respectively, and to make the annual discussion on the human rights of women fully accessible to persons with disabilities;

Requests the Office of the High Commissioner to submit to the Human Rights Council, at its fifty-ninth session, an accessible report in plain language and easy-to-read formats, on the situation of human rights of women and girls in criminal justice detention, including information on practices and measures to prevent and address violence against women and girls in the context of criminal justice detention, as well as good practices and challenges relating to rehabilitation and reintegration policies and programmes, with input from all relevant stakeholders, including States Members of the United Nations, United Nations bodies, agencies, the treaty bodies, the special procedures of the Council, national human rights institutions, civil society organizations, women’s and girls’ rights organizations and women and girls with lived experience in criminal justice;

Decides to continue its consideration of the issue of the elimination of all forms of violence against women and girls as a matter of high priority, in conformity with its programme of work, at its fifty-ninth session.

Who adopted this document and its mandates?

What subjects does this mandate have?

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