From Margin to Centre: Strengthening Minority Women’s Role in Peacebuilding

Geneva Peace Week 2025 | 15 October 2025 | Panel Recap

During Geneva Peace Week 2025, LAW’s Founder and Executive Director, Antonia Mulvey, participated in the panel “From Margin to Centre: Strengthening Minority Women’s Role in Peacebuilding.”

Co-hosted by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Council of Europe (CoE), and Legal Action Worldwide (LAW), the panel aimed to highlight the need for inclusive approaches for sustainable peace, and showcase some of the pivotal efforts to empower minority women to participate in conflict resolution.

The panelists were:

• Prof. Judith Wyttenbach, Member of the Council of Europe Advisory Committee of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities in respect of Switzerland and Gender Equality Rapporteur (online)
• Terezia Rostas, Founder of Care for Young People’s Future CIC & Welcoming Cultures UK/ Roma cultural producer
• Hernan Vales, Chief of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Indigenous Peoples and Minorities Section
• Opening remarks were provided by Ambassador Christophe Kamp, OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, and Miroslav Papa, Special Representative of the Secretary General of the Council of Europe for United Nations
• Closing remarks were made by Dr. Lara Scarpitta, OSCE Senior Adviser on Gender Issues

Antonia’s remarks drew on LAW’s extensive field experience across Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to illustrate both the resilience of survivors and the institutional changes required to support them. She emphasised that most survivors represented by LAW belong to minority groups – defined by religion, ethnicity, or language – and how identity-based exclusion is common across all contexts. It is frequently compounded by the absence of legal identity, leaving individuals without documentation necessary to access education, healthcare, or social protection. “Without the most basic legal documentation,” she explained, “the barriers multiply.”

“A critical starting point,” she said, “is to ask survivors what justice means to them.” She cited LAW’s survey of more than 500 Rohingya community members, conducted seven years after their displacement, in which respondents overwhelmingly identified restorative justice as their primary aspiration – reparations in the form of compensation, citizenship, and restitution of land and property.

She explained that 80 per cent of LAW’s staff are based in-country and embedded within the communities they serve, enabling direct and sustained engagement with survivors’ changing priorities. “Context proximity,” she noted, “allows us to respond in real time to how survivors define their own pathways to justice.”

Despite deteriorating global conditions, she pointed to measurable results: “In the past year alone, LAW secured 206 legal wins. It demonstrates that progress, while incremental, remains attainable.”

She went on to describe three recent outcomes LAW had that exemplify how accountability can strengthen participation:

The first involved a case before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), where LAW secured provisional measures on behalf of Tigrayan women who had suffered sexual violence and destruction of property, an important precedent in advancing claims for reparations.

The second was a landmark decision by the CEDAW Committee concerning South Sudanese women and girls subjected to sexual slavery, in which the Committee agreed, for the first time in its forty-year history, to protect survivors’ identities prior to state notification.

The third case, currently before a court in Lebanon, concerns an Ethiopian domestic worker held in conditions amounting to slavery for seven years. The presiding judge affirmed that detaining an individual on the basis of nationality and gender can constitute a prosecutable offence.

Her intervention concluded with a call for sustained, survivor-centred engagement that bridges justice, documentation, and political participation. “Minority women are not merely beneficiaries of peacebuilding,” she affirmed. “They are essential agents in shaping it. If we enable their access to justice, documentation, and participation, we lay the foundation for peace that is inclusive, legitimate, and lasting.”