The project titled “Azerbaijan Women Lawyers” started to be implemented by Education for Human Rights and Azerbaijan Women Lawyers’ Forum. According to the project coordinator, lawyer Irada Javadova (right), the project aims at learning the problems of women’s lawyers at work and organize further actions to fight against the obstacles. (01-AUG-07)

Written by Shahla Ismailova / HRH Baku

Being conducted in cooperation with OSCE Baku office, the project intends to monitor the situation of women lawyers in Azerbaijan. The lack of engagement of women’s lawyers and gender-related discriminative aspects will be analyzed due to project too.

Preparatory meeting
On 31 July, there was organized the meeting with participation of women lawyers from the Ministry of Justice, Municipalities, Ministry of Defense, lawyers’ union as well as gender experts.

The discussions were around the obstacles preventing women lawyers to work, to get promoted at higher decision-making positions. The traditional stereotypes and the dilemma of choice – family or career – were stressed to be the key obstacles for women’s engagement and empowerment.

The interrelatedness of factors related to education, gaps in the system, corruption, traditional approaches was discussed as well. At the end one of the conclusions was that solidarity and cooperation between responsible governmental bodies and NGOs is needed to address the issue on proper level.

Project activity
Within the project framework it is planned to conduct comprehensive monitoring in the governmental bodies to reveal the engagement of women lawyers. The meetings in the state agencies with women lawyer employees, survey among them are among the planned activities.

At the end of the project the preparation and publication of the comprehensive report on the results of monitoring will be published.