Partners - Alliance of Women in Slovakia

The Alliance of Women in Slovakia is a citizens´ movement. We have begun in January 1993 as an initiative of a small group of women who had already been actively engaged in public life. These women gave rise to a network of women across the whole of Slovakia who felt a need to provide and to obtain information and experience about life in other communities, and were committed to actively support the development of civic awareness and civic culture in their own community.

In 1998 we have launched activities to stop domestic violence (there was not even a reference term for domestic violence in legislation in Slovakia). In order to change the situation of the constant lack of law experts on women’s issues, the Alliance has established a program of training for women lawyers called AdvoCats, together with ProFem – Prague and Amnesty for Women -Hamburg.

In March 1999 the Alliance of Slovak Women became an advisory body to the Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee for Human Rights and Minorities. We have prepared an International Conference on Trafficking in Women (with Friedrich Ebert Stiftung) and further seminar for Police representatives from the whole Slovakia.

Bringing together a team of legislation experts we had prepared amendments of laws against domestic violence (spring – autumn 2001) which were passed by the Parliament on June 19, 2002 as a part of the governmental proposal. Immediately after this we met at a seminar with police representatives of all regions of Slovakia and informed them about the changes and discussed their feed back and further needs. We prepared a series of pilot educational participative seminars on domestic violence tailored for police, advocates, judges, doctors, social workers, and other professions dealing with the issue of domestic violence in order to bring them afterwards to a round table to discuss a creation of mutual manuals for all their colleagues. Currently we are condicting a series of training in raising awareness of women according to their professions – such as judges, members of parliament, high ranking political party members and others.

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