A group of trainers from the National Institute of Justice participated in the mentoring program for legal professionals on women's access to justice. The course took place during the period 21-23 June 2022, in Budapest, Hungary, and brought together representatives of the national law system from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Moldova.
The program aimed to strengthen practitioner’s skills on the Istanbul Convention of the Council of Europe and gender equality standards, strengthening the judicial training in the Eastern Partnership countries. Having a different approach from traditional classroom lecture, courses or textbooks, the new methodology establishes a link between theories of access to justice, the international human rights framework and the daily work of professionals, with a particular focus on specific areas in which are frequently faced difficulties.
The training sessions were delivered by the Council of Europe experts Zora Csalagovits and Elisabeth Duban, who also presented the “Guidelines for developing a mentoring programme on access to justice for women ", designed to enhance continuous learning for legal practitioners, in particular for judges and prosecutors. The use of this tool will allow mentees to focus on three aspects of improving women's access to justice: pair with abstract concepts with their daily work, referring to international law in domestic cases, identifying and responding to gender stereotypes and prejudices gender in legal practice.
The Council of Europe's mentoring program for legal professionals was organized as part of the Partnership for Good Governance's regional project "Women's access to justice: - implementation of the Istanbul Convention and other European standards in the field of gender equality".