Croatia torn over the inclusion of femicide in the law

2023-12-21 13:21:41

Croatia is shaken by the issue of femicide. The country was shaken by the death of Mihaela Berak, 20, on September 21. A man with whom she had a brief relationship, a police officer, is in custody, suspected of having shot her with his service weapon. The murder of this law student gave rise to a lively debate in Croatia on the errors of a system responsible for protecting victims, and on the legal texts which decide on the penalties incurred.

Because Mihaela had alerted those close to her about what she thought of the police officer she had briefly seen. “He’s fucking crazy,” she wrote in a message to her friends published in the press after his death. “Possessive”, “deranged”, “manipulative to the last degree”… the words she used to describe him were clear. “How is it possible that a man, whom a young girl concluded after knowing him for only a few days, that he was manipulative and obsessive, takes a physiological test and obtains a gun permit? asks Sanja Kastratovic of the women’s rights group Adela from Osijek, Mihaela’s hometown.

Femicide, a crime apart in few countries

On November 25, the international day against violence against women, demonstrators across Croatia demanded justice for Mihaela. And demanded the inclusion of femicide in the law, the transformation of all forms of violence against women into crimes rather than misdemeanors, and the ban on the carrying of weapons by police officers outside of their duties.

The conservative Prime Minister, Andrej Plenkovic, announced at the beginning of September a battery of measures to combat violence against women and children. Among them, several amendments to the Penal Code, including one aimed at making femicide a separate crime, punishable by 10 to 40 years in prison. In the European Union, only Cyprus and Malta have done the same.

Discriminatory registration?

Last year, 2,300 women were killed in Europe by their partner or family members, according to EU data. In Croatia, which has a population of 3.8 million, 13 women were killed – 12 of them by a relative. For activists, these figures justify the urgency of changing the law. “The Penal Code should specify that femicide is an aggravating circumstance which calls for particularly severe sanctions, long prison sentences,” explains Dorotea Susak, head of the Center for Women’s Studies.

Some Supreme Court judges believe that enshrining femicide in the law would be discriminatory – for men. “By distinguishing between the murder of a woman, it would appear that the life of a woman is worth more than that of a man,” judges of the Supreme Court ruled in October in a text published on its website. But according to the president of the court, Radovan Dobronic, this opinion does not take into account the Istanbul Convention on the Protection of Women, which Croatia ratified in 2018.

“Protecting women from gender-based violence”

This international agreement aimed at protecting women from domestic violence, marital rape, genital mutilation, etc. is the first binding instrument in the world intended to prevent and combat violence against women. According to the convention, “special measures necessary to prevent and protect women against gender-based violence will not be considered discrimination,” underlines Rodovan Dobronic.

For human rights organizations, the judges’ argument does not hold up, since constitutional equality between men and women is violated every day. And that more than 90% of crimes against women are committed by men, adds Dorotea Susak.