| ALDA
FACIO
Alda Facio is a jurist,
writer and an international expert on women’s human rights,
gender violence and gender analysis. In September 1996, she was
awarded the first Women’s Human Rights Award from International
Women, Law and Development in Washington D.C. As one of the founders
of the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice in the International
Criminal Court, she was its first Director from July 1997 to the
end of 1998. Since 1990, she has been the Director of the Women,
Gender and Justice Program at the United Nations Latin American
Institute for Crime Prevention (ILANUD) based in Costa Rica. The
Program centers its work around the elimination of gender inequality
and violence against women from a criminal and human rights perspective,
doing research on the different forms of discrimination against
diverse groups of women, analyzing the laws and legal doctrine and
training judges, police, lawyers and women's groups in several Latin
American countries in the human rights of women and the incorporation
of gender sensitive perspectives in the analysis of legal texts
and contexts.
While at ILANUD she designed
a methodology for analyzing the law and legal traditions from a
gender sensitive perspective which was published in book form as
one of ILANUD's many publications. This methodology, based on the
UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
Against Women, has been republished in several Latin American countries
and has been used by parlamentarians, judges, lawyers and women's
centers from several Caribbean and Latin American countries when
analyzing women's legal status and for writing law proposals. She
has also designed several training manuals for administration of
justice staff and the judiciary, including one on CEDAW and its
Optional Protocol which are currently being used in several Latin
American countries.
She was very involved
in all the activities around the World Conference on Human Rights
in Vienna and the IV World Conference on Women. For example, she
helped organize the Women's "Satellite" Conference on
Human Rights in Latin America, and participated in the Costa Rican
official government delegations in the Regional as well as the Vienna
Conference. For the Beijing Conference she participated in the official
delegations in the Regional Preparatory Meeting in Mar del Plata,
Argentina and in the PrepCom in New York. She helped in the organization
of the Vienna Tribunal on Violence Against Women organized by the
Global Center and was appointed legal aid to Judge Elizabeth Odio
at that Tribunal.
She has participated
in many U.N. meetings as an expert on gender, including the 1990
Expert Group Meeting convened by UNICEF and UNIFEM in Panama, on
strategies to end violence in the family; the 1992 Expert Group
Meeting on Domestic Violence convened by the United Nations Crime
Prevention and Criminal Justice Branch of the Centre for Social
Development and Humanitarian Affairs and hosted by the International
Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy in Vancouver,
Canada; the 1993 meeting hosted by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign
Affairs for the purpose of designing strategies to end violence
against women; the 1993 Expert Group Meeting on Measures to Eradicate
Violence Against Women, convened by the Division for the Advancement
of Women of the United Nations and hosted by the Center for Women's
Global Leadership at Rutgers University; the 1994 Expert Group Meeting
convened by UNICEF and UNIFEM on violence in the family, and the
1995 Expert Group Meeting convened by the Centre for Human Rights
and UNIFEM on the development of guidelines for the incorporation
of gender sensitive perspectives in the work of the United Nations
system wide work on human rights, the 1997 expert group meeting
on Gender Based Persecution convened by the Division for the Advancement
of Women of the U.N., the 1999 meeting on Health and Violence convened
by PAHO and the 2000 expert group meeting convened by the OMS on
Health and Violence against Women. She was one of the final candidates
for Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women in 1994.
Alda Facio participated
as a government delegate in the drafting of the Optional Protocol
to CEDAW and the Rome Conference which adopted the Statute of the
International Criminal Court. In 2001, she participated as the Costa
Rican delegate to the X U.N. Crime Prevention Congress held in Vienna.
The Program she directs is responsible for institutionalizing the
annual official meetings of the Latin American Women Supreme Court
Justices and for establishing the First Costa Rican Women’s
Parliament held in 2002. For the past seven years she has participated
as a facilitator at the Global to Local Workshop hosted by IWRAW-Asia
Pacific and UNIFEM during the CEDAW Committee’s meetings in
New York. She has been observing these meetings since 1990.
She continuously writes
articles on women's human rights which have been published in various
books and Law Reviews. She also writes on women's issues for various
Latin American newspapers and magazines, including FEMPRESS for
whom she was a correspondent. She has written numerous reports on
the issue of discrimination against women for several governments,
and in 1994 was asked to write the NGO Report on Violence Against
Women for the Regional Preparatory Meeting in Mar del Plata, Argentina
for the IV World Conference on Women. She has written law proposals
on violence against women and measures to eliminate discrimination
against women for various Latin American legislatures. She was one
of the first women in Latin America to denounce the androcentric
bias in Human Rights law and practices, writing articles and giving
lectures on the subject in several Latin American countries. One
of her long articles on the subject, "El androcentrismo de
los Derechos Humanos" has been published in several books on
women's human rights including "La Mujer Ausente" published
by ISIS Internacional in 1991.
She organized the first
seminar on Violence Against Women held in the Supreme Court of Costa
Rica in 1981 and helped set up the first shelter in this country.
She taught the first graduate course on Violence Against Women at
the University of Costa Rica for students from the Spanish speaking
countries in Central America in 1989. She has taught at several
universities at the graduate level on the importance of and methodology
for incorporating gender sensitive perspectives in the analysis
of texts and has lectured extensively on this subject in several
universities in Latin America, Spain, the USA and Canada, as well
as in human rights and women's organizations and law centers. In
2003 she was the 7th Dame Nita Barrow Distinguished Visitor at the
University of Toronto were she taught a course on CEDAW and Peacebuilding.
For the past two years she has been a professor at the U.N. University
for Peace in Costa Rica where she teaches on women’s human
rights and peace building with a focus on CEDAW. She has helped
in the organization or been appointed a judge in several popular
tribunals in Latin America and Haiti. In 1986 she organized the
first workshop on Women's Human Rights held at the Inter American
Human Rights Institute's (IIDH) annual course on Human Rights. In
1987 she organized an International Meeting on Women's Human Rights
hosted by this Institute.
Alda Facio has
also been a judge in the District Court of Guadalupe in Costa Rica,
the founder and General Director of the Costa Rican National Dance
Company, a professor of Roman Law at the Law Faculty of the University
of Costa Rica and for six years she was the Costa Rican Alternate
Delegate to the United Nations Offices in Geneva. In 2002 she was
a candidate to the Supreme Court of Costa Rica. She is fluent in
Spanish and English, speaks and understands French and Italian and
understands Portuguese.
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