Gender in Different Regimes

Feminist constitutionalism has been being an interpretation guideline for Brazilian Supreme Court for almost 20 years. Since the early 2000‘s, the Court has been provoked to analyze themes related to women‘s rights in different areas of law (e.g. individual rights, social security, labor, criminal and electoral). The lack of minoriy representation on Parliament is one of the reasons why Brazilian Judiciary acts. Unsurprisingly the recent debate about the impacts of tax on gender inequality reached Brazilian Constitutional Court. The Court is now called to answer if tax laws are indirectly discriminatory against women. It means that the Court is being pushed to elucidate if tax laws that result on a bigger tax burden to women than to men are unconstitutional according to the general clause of gender equality. Therefore the paper proposes to exam the role of tax on gender inequality in Brazil and how the Supreme Court could arise as one of the most important players on this debate.

The public fight for women‘s rights in independent Kyrgyzstan dates back to the 90s when a delegation of gender activists first took part in the Beijing Platform for Action. Since then, Kyrgyzstan has gradually acceded to the leading international treaties on women‘s rights. In this regard, the country has begun to harmonize and develop national legislation per the standards of gender equality and non-discrimination by mainstreaming gender into its policy and legal framework. Even though the current Constitution declares that men and women have equal rights and freedoms, the actual figure appears to be far off the mark. This paper will analyze the gender aspects in Kyrgyzstan‘s constitutional and sub-constitutional legal design. The study begins with an overview of how the gender equality concept has been constitutionalized and integrated into Kyrgyzstan‘s legislation, followed by an assessment of the effectiveness of the implementation of gender-sensitive legislation in Kyrgyzstan.

In the last decades, the judiciaries of some European jurisdictions, including Slovenia, have undergone a dramatic transformation in the form of a significant rise in the share of women among their judges. In Slovenia, today women represent almost 80 percent of all judges. In this situation, voices from the legal profession, academic circles, and the political arena have started calling for a balanced gender composition of the judiciary and demanding measures to address the existing imbalance in favour of women. The paper critically evaluates such categorical appeals to judicial diversity. It argues that more often than not such appeals build on a misunderstanding of the rationale underlying diversity, its relation to (gender) equality, and misconceptions of the legal framework for combating discrimination, which is mostly due to inadequate consideration of the historic development and current social context of gender inequality in general, and within the judiciary in particular.

In a context of historical and structural discrimination against women and LGBTIQ+ persons, the rulings issued by the Mexican Supreme Court in September of 2021 are salutatory, for recognizing explicitly the constitutional right of women and persons with gestational capacities to terminate their pregnancies. These decisions were made after a long-standing struggle of women for their rights, including the right to autonomy and reproductive health. In this paper, I show the importance and implications of these judicial opinions: the first one, decriminalizes abortion, and the second one, determines that states do not have the legal power to legislate about the beginning of life being from the moment of conception (a religious doctrine). To this effect, I analyze the main concepts and arguments of the Justices of the Mexican Supreme Court. I conclude that these rulings are sound and do justice for the rights of women and other minorities, like trans persons and non-binary individuals.