Kubal, Agnieszka;
(2023)
The Women’s Complaint: sociolegal mobilization against authoritarian backsliding following the 2020 abortion law in Poland.
Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe
10.1080/25739638.2023.2258609.
(In press).
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Abstract
The decision of the Constitutional Tribunal in October 2020 has severely curtailed women’s reproductive rights in Poland. Mass protests ensued. This article focuses on the untold story of a productive rupture that channelled the protesters’ efforts into a mass legal mobilization against the tribunal’s judgement to the European Court of Human Rights. These applications, known as the “Women’s Complaint,” were filed by over one thousand Polish women. Triangulating between analysis of interviews with human rights lawyers and feminist activists, and the legal reasoning of the petition, this article’s original contribution traces the evolution of the Women’s Complaint from a reproductive rights dispute to a challenge to the government’s authoritarian backsliding to better understand the relationship between social conflicts and legal mobilization. Reproductive rights and democratic values are inextricable; threats to one reinforce threats to the other. The Women’s Complaint is about women standing up for their reproductive rights and – in effect – spearheading a much broader rights-based litigation against authoritarianism.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Women’s Complaint: sociolegal mobilization against authoritarian backsliding following the 2020 abortion law in Poland |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/25739638.2023.2258609 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/25739638.2023.2258609 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Keywords: | Reproductive rights; Poland; European Court of Human Rights; legal mobilization |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10177430 |
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