Gender equality and anti-discrimination in Montenegro

Sanja Elezović, representative of the UNDP Gender Programme Montenegro participated at the 2ndmeeting of officials from enlargement countries, as well as at the senior level international conference “Progress in Women’s Human Rights in the 3rd Year of the Istanbul Convention”. These events took place from 6th to 8th November 2013 in Istanbul.

The first event, the 2nd meeting of officials from enlargement countries was organized by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) and the Ministry of Family and Social Policy of the Republic of Turkey, while the organizers of the second event were Council of Europe, EU, UN Women and the Turkish Ministry of Family and Social Policies.

The aim of the 2nd meeting of officials from enlargement countries was threefold: a) exchange of information and experience on recent developments in the field of gender equality of the candidate and potential candidate countries, b) exchange of experiences related to the gender perspective in countries' strategy papers and other accession strategies and programs, c) presentation of EIGE researches and assessments, including the Gender Equality Index, in order to define possible areas of cooperation between EIGE and interested parties from candidate and potential candidate countries. Participants of the meeting were from Turkey, Macedonia[1], Kosovo[2] and Montenegro.

The second event, “Progress in Women’s Human Rights in the 3rd Year of the Istanbul Convention” gathered high officials from the Council of Europe, EU (Stefan Fule), European Parliament, UN Women (Ingibjorg Solrun Gisladottir, RD for Europe and Central Asia), UNDP (Cihan Sultanoglu,), Turkey, Albania, Italy, Macedonia, Kosovo, etc. The main aim of the conference was to offer the forum for discussion on problems related to violence against women and family violence and to present experience of countries that have already ratified the Istanbul Convention. The meeting was concluded with the adoption of the following Recommendations:

- Starting from the fact that the Istanbul Convention has a strong focus on prevention, participants agreed that all signatories should invest more efforts in training of professionals in the police, medical institutions and support services how to deal with victims, but also to set up treatment programs for perpetrators.

- Also, it is very important to include issues related to gender equality and non-violent conflict resolution in interpersonal relationships in teaching material and to regularly run public awareness campaigns.

- Participants also agreed that NGOs, media and private sector can significantly contribute to promotion of mutual respect among sexes and in fighting the gender stereotypes.

- EU expects the candidate and the potential candidate countries to endorse the targets of the Europe 2020 strategy and to further work on mainstreaming gender equality in the legislative process, to upgrade political participation of women, and to close the gender gap in education and employment through creating the conditions for women’s access to labor market.