Lawyer, decide, professor, UN authorized knowledgeable, researcher – compelled to begin over repeatedly, Dr. Cecilia Medina Quiroga has earned herself practically each title you might consider within the discipline of legislation. Above all, she is a specialist in worldwide human rights legislation who actually believes that girls’s rights may be superior by the applying of human rights. Her perspective has contributed to the event of girls’s rights safety, notably within the Inter-American Courtroom for Human Rights’ historic “Cotton Subject Femicide” case over which she presided.
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First beginnings
Cecilia Medina Quiroga was born on 17 November 1935 in Concepción, Chile, and grew up in Chile’s capital Santiago. She describes her household as progressive, together with her mom and all of her aunts having college levels, but additionally as quite poor, which is why she had to decide on a research programme throughout which she may work part-time.1) She went on to review legislation on the College of Chile in Santiago in 1953 and graduated with summa cum laude in 1959 as Licenciada en Ciencias Jurídicas y Sociales (equal to a bachelor’s diploma). She remembers being a curious scholar whose fixed questions typically aggravated her fellow college students.
After having been admitted as a lawyer and getting married, she moved to the north of Chile together with her husband, the place she opened up a personal apply.2) She remembers fighting demanding charges from poorer shoppers and describes herself as “not a very good lawyer in that sense”.3) The primary of many new beginnings, she separated from her husband and returned to Santiago as a single mom after practically ten years as a practising lawyer.4) In 1969, she was in a position to decide up educating constitutional legislation on the College of Chile. That is the place she found her pleasure and expertise for educating others within the discipline of legislation.5) In 1972, she grew to become a rapporteur on the Constitutional Courtroom of Chile.
Life in exile
Nevertheless, Cecilia Medina Quiroga’s promising profession alternatives have been reduce brief after Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état in 1973. As she and her new husband, the socialist lawyer Waldo Fortin Cabezas, have been supporters of former President Salvador Allende, remaining within the nation grew constantly extra harmful – this can be grimly illustrated by the execution of her cousin throughout the early regime days. Cecilia Medina Quiroga left Chile on 30 November 1973, after refusing to denounce Allende to be able to proceed working on the college.6)
Cecilia Medina Quiroga, her three kids and her husband have been amongst the few hundreds of Chileans who fled to East Germany the place they quickly got here to understand their skilled future hardly stood any probability.7) With the assistance of Orlando Letelier, an exiled former diplomat for the Allende authorities, the Medina-Fortin-family was in a position to transfer to Washington D.C., planning on working collectively in academia.8) The plan fell by when in 1976, Letelier was killed by a automotive bomb, main many US-People to turn out to be reluctant to make use of Chileans with connections to him.9) Cecilia Medina Quiroga as a substitute utilized for a job as a secretary on the “Institute for the Growth of Indian Legislation”, a non-profit Native American authorized organisation. When the pinnacle of the Institute realised she surpassed even his skilled {qualifications}, he supplied her a analysis place to put in writing background papers for the primary Worldwide NGO Convention on Discrimination towards Indigenous Populations within the Americas due in 1977.10) The work allowed Cecilia Medina Quiroga to first plunge into human rights legislation and uncover her skilled ardour.11) Her scenario as a political exile in Washington, nonetheless, worsened when she began to obtain harassing and threatening cellphone calls.12)
The household thus determined to maneuver as soon as once more, this time to the Netherlands the place many different Chilean folks had been granted asylum. Adjusting to yet one more new nation, studying a brand new language, and searching for a job gave Cecilia Medina Quiroga a Sisyphus-like feeling.13) Nonetheless, she managed to return to academia – the work that she felt “most pleased with” on the time14) – and have become a lecturer and researcher on the School of Legislation at Utrecht College in 1980, first on the Europa Institute after which on the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights. Regardless of the challenges she confronted, she completed her dissertation “The Battle of Human Rights – Gross, Systematic Violations and the Inter-American System” in 1988 – as, what some have deemed essential to level out, an over fifty-year-old grandmother.15) As a lecturer, she broadened the school’s human rights curriculum by educating (comparative) programs on the Inter-American system for the primary time.16)
Return to Chile
After Pinochet was compelled to just accept the tip of his dictatorship in 1990, Cecilia Medina Quiroga was in a position to return to her dwelling nation. She used her connection to the brand new Chilean international minister – additionally her former superior on the College of Chile – to obtain a nomination for the UN Human Rights Committee.17) She was elected in 1995 and served an eight-year time period, from 1999 to 2000 as Chair of the Committee. Considered one of her excellent achievements as Chair was the drafting of Basic Remark 28 on Artwork. 3 of the Worldwide Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It up to date the Committee’s interpretation of the equality of rights between women and men, e.g. declaring that the criminalisation of abortion might violate the precise to life and private integrity. Cecilia Medina Quiroga discovered that her expertise as a member of an UN treaty physique gained her the power to critically assess her “personal continental tradition and traditions”.18)
This perception proved to be worthwhile when she grew to become the second feminine decide on the Inter-American Courtroom for Human Rights primarily based in Costa Rica in 2004. From 2008 to 2009 she was its first feminine president. She was an knowledgeable match for the place for the reason that court docket needed to take care of gross human rights violations on a big scale – the subject on which she wrote her dissertation. Her work on the court docket was definitely guided by her perception that in a authorized context, “girls’s issues” might be solved by the interpretation of human rights legislation. This precept she had already identified in 1995:
“As you understand, each time a lawyer reads a authorized provision, the very first thing she says when requested about its that means is ‘It relies upon.’ Typically, the reader makes the legislation greater than the legislation makes the reader. Due to this fact, if we learn the legislation with girls’s eyes, we most likely will be capable of go a great distance into incorporating financial, social, and cultural rights into civil and political rights, that are a lot better protected on the worldwide stage.”
The Cotton Subject femicide
Of the seventy instances for which Cecilia Medina Quiroga set on the bench, one particularly stands out for its affect on gender jurisprudence: the “Cotton Subject Femicide” case (González et al. vs. Mexico).19) The case occurred within the context of an elevated variety of abductions and murders of girls in Ciudad Juárez within the Nineteen Nineties/early 2000s. In Autumn 2001, Claudia Ivette González (20), Esmeralda Herrera Monreal (15) and Laura Berenice Ramos Monárrez (17) disappeared after leaving work. Their household regularly contacted the police, however they didn’t launch an actual investigation, basing their indifference on sexist stereotypes, e.g. suggesting the younger girl and women had most likely run off with their boyfriends. In November 2001, the our bodies of the three have been present in a cotton discipline along with the our bodies of 5 different younger girls. The Tribunal concluded that they’d been held captive, confirmed indicators of extreme psychological and bodily struggling, and really presumably skilled sexual violence.
The Tribunal discovered that the Mexican State had violated a number of of the rights enshrined within the American Conference on Human Rights, notably the precise to life, the precise to humane remedy and the precise to non-public liberty. Because it couldn’t be confirmed that the state was actively concerned within the disappearance and abuse of the ladies, the Tribunal needed to set up that the duty to ensure human rights contains the obligation to forestall violations. On this means, the judgment marks an necessary precedent for states’ duty for violence towards girls by non-public actors – the dearth of which had usually been criticised in feminist authorized concept. Considerably, the Tribunal additionally discovered violence towards girls to represent gender discrimination and acknowledged its structural context. Based mostly on that, it ordered reparations not solely as injury funds for the subsequent of kin however with a transformative purpose, akin to making a nationwide memorial for the victims, conducting a brand new investigation of the murders, and enhancing prevention measures.
Whether or not this groundbreaking precedent would have been set in the identical means with out the affect of Cecilia Medina Quiroga stays mere hypothesis. In any occasion, it does align together with her physique of labor. In her concurring opinion she even criticised that the Tribunal wouldn’t classify the dearth of prevention of the abusive acts as torture.
Tutorial work and legacy
In between and through her worldwide positions, Cecilia Medina Quiroga stored on working in academia: since 1990 as a professor of worldwide legislation at Diego Portales College in Santiago, and since 1997 on the College of Chile, the place she co-founded the Human Rights Centre in 2002. Aside from that, she has labored as a visitor professor at quite a few establishments akin to Harvard Legislation Faculty. She obtained the standing of professor emeritus from the College of Chile in 2016 and from Diego Portales College in 2018. Throughout her lengthy tutorial profession, she has printed extensively on human rights legislation with a particular deal with the Inter-American system in addition to girls’s rights. Her work of mainstreaming girls’s rights by the worldwide authorized framework has received her many prizes, most notably the Gruber Ladies’s Rights Prize in 2006. Even at nearly ninety years outdated, she stays an influential voice: Final yr, she delivered a robust speech on democracy and human rights at an award ceremony, reminding the subsequent technology of younger attorneys that
“Our combat is way from over. The challenges we face immediately within the discipline of human rights are maybe much less seen, however no much less necessary than half a century in the past. Inequality, discrimination, gender-based violence, the rights of indigenous peoples, the local weather disaster and its results on human rights are simply a few of the fronts on which we should proceed to combat, and naturally, the excellent debt to unresolved disappearances and justice for individuals who suffered mass violations should at all times be current in our pondering.”
It’s not solely her authorized pondering that gives inspiration, but additionally her private life. Cecilia Medina Quiroga’s story serves as a reminder to remain resilient, to stay true to our values and to let our work be guided by them.
Additional readings and sources:
- Daniel Terris, Cesare P. R. Romano, Leigh Swigart, The Worldwide Choose: An Introduction to the Males and Ladies who Determine the World’s Instances, 2007, 180-190.
- Cecilia Medina Quiroga, The Battle of Human Rights, 1988.
- Cecilia Medina Quiroga, The Inter-American Fee on Human Rights and Ladies, with explicit reference to violence, in Castermans et al., The function of the nation-state within the 21st century: human rights, worldwide organisations and international coverage, 1998.
- Cecilia Medina Quiroga, The Position of Worldwide Tribunals: Legislation-Making or Artistic Interpretation, in Shelton, The Oxford Handbook of Worldwide Human Rights Legislation, 2015, 649-669.
- Interview (in Spanish) with the Dominican Fundación Institucionalidad y Justicia: Conversatorio FINJUS: Magistrada Cecilia Medina Quiroga (youtube.com).
- Video (in Spanish) about Cecilia Medina Quiroga’s skilled life, together with many aged pictures: MASTER CECILIA MEDINA (youtube.com).
