UN Women in Action: Ending Violence against Women

UN Women helps countries pass laws, provide services and raise awareness to prevent and eliminate violence against women and girls. Recent work includes:

• Legal frameworks to prevent and combat domestic violence have been developed and strengthened across the region, improving prosecution and prevention measures.Through UN Women’s support and advocacy, Serbia, Ukraine, and Kosovo* made amendments to their Criminal Codes to align them with the Istanbul Convention, Kazakhstan revised a law on domestic violence prevention, and Ukraine introduced a new law on domestic violence.
• The implementation of legislative commitments has been strengthened through the creation of National Strategies and National Action Planson preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence by the governments of Georgia, North Macedonia and Moldova. These frameworks, developed with technical assistance from UN Women, set out key government interventions and serve as a mechanism for holding them to account.
• UN Women is amplifying the voices of marginalized and disadvantaged women to tackle discrimination and violence in the Western Balkans and Turkey through the regional programme ‘Implementing Norms, Changing Minds’. Through using a ‘by and for’ approach, marginalized women are represented by women from their own communities to highlight the specific issues they face.
• UN Women is working with governments to improve the collection of data on violence against women to inform evidence-based policymaking and raise awareness. In Kosovo, the first National Unified Database for tracking cases of violence against women and domestic violence has been established, and a statistical tool has been developed in Moldova for data collection on domestic violence.
• In partnership with the Public Defender’s Office in Georgia, UN Women launched its second Femicide Watch Report which analysed cases of femicide in 2017, highlighted measures for femicide prevention and focused on the challenges of existing protection mechanisms.

* Under UN Security Council resolution 1244 in all references.