The Court of Women
A Human Rights Tribunal
One of the vehicles that feminists have used to keep women’s human rights abuses in the public view and to educate about the continuing negation of women’s human rights are the women’s tribunals. These tribunals have been held at various venues around the world and have also become a staple at many social forums. These people’s tribunals are formal, but unofficial, venues where individual actors/states/governments are “put on trial” for the human rights abuses they perpetrate, allow to happen, or even promote in various ways.
The Court of Women at the U.S. Social Forum took place on the afternoon of June 28th, 2007 from 1:00 – 5:30 p.m. at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, 435 Peachtree St. NE Atlanta, GA. Our USSF Court of Women featured three women as “judges” who sat to hear testimony in three areas. These were: Violence Against Women, the U.S. Criminal [In]Justice system, Hurricane Katrina/Gulf Coast Crisis, with immigration issues woven throughout the three. These topics were chosen by representatives of approximately one hundred feminist organizations from around the U.S. who make up the US Social Forum’s Women’s Working Group, one of the major organizing committees for the USSF and chaired by Loretta Ross of SisterSong. The Women’s Working Group was established to ensure gender equity/gender parity at the USSF and to ensure that “women’s issues” were highly represented at the first US Social Forum.
Each judge made an opening statement prior to the testimonies on one of the three session topics and then each a closing statement after all proceedings had concluded. One expert witness and several survivor testifiers gave testimony for each of the three session topics. The Court was divided into three sessions, each concentrating on one topic. The expert witnesses testified first in order to help further orient the audience witnesses to the human rights abuse and then the survivor witnesses gave their testimony to the abuse they have suffered.
Interspersed between sessions, as well as to open and to close the Court were performance interludes which were designed to relieve some of the tension that built as a result of the testimonies and judges’ statements, but also to help set appropriate mental frameworks for the Court. The Call to the Court of Women was performed by drummer Danny Stern. Interludes performers were Dennis Brutus who read his poem, “I must conjure from my past” and an excerpt from Robin’s Morgan’s “A Woman’s Creed”; Elise Witt led a collective singing of “Open the window, let the dove fly in”; Megan Baxter led us in a breathing/movement ritual; Sara Thorsen and Hannah Leatherbury performed a spiritual dance based on many different traditions; Suga Mathews sang her “Healing Song”; and Sandra Lee Hughes played “The Hymn to the Great Spirit” on her the Native American flute to close the Court of Women.
The Court of Women is taking its work beyond the day of the event in two ways. The Women’s Working Group sponsored off-shoot workshops and panel discussions on the session topics on the following two days of the forum which were organized by the many feminist organizations that make up the Women’s Working Group. Also, we will carry on the work of the Court of Women by continuing to take testimony to add to the Court documents, by soliciting reports of incidents where women’s human rights are abrogated, denied them, by collaborating with other feminist organizations in a myriad of ways to work to expose and to correct the abuse perpetrated by patriarchal society and its forces, and by planning future Courts of Women.
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