On the occasion of the international day for the abolition of violence against women on 25 November, a conference "Ni una muerta mas - Balance y Perspectivas" (No more violence against women: State of play and perspectives) took place in Brussels on 19 November 2009. The conference was also attended by Anna von Gall, ECCHR's future program director for Gender and Human Rights. The aim of the conference was to provide an overview of activities in the past years and develop further steps and a concrete strategy for putting the subject on the agenda of the upcoming EU-Latin-America/Carribean summit.

These days it is not only the Mexican border town Ciudad Juárez that is well-known for its multitude of feminicides - the phenomenon takes place in various Central American countries on a day-to-day basis. In the past years relatives of victims and women's rights organizations have increasingly called the dramatic dimension of these crimes and their complete impunity to the attention of the international community.

The European Parliament in 2007 passed a resolution on the feminicides in Mexico and Central America and on the role of the European Union in the combat of these crimes. The parliament emphasized states' responsibility for prevention, prosecution and abolition of violence against women. It requested more initiatives to end the impunity from both the states involved and the European Institutions.

Two years after this resolution the numbers of feminicides continue to grow and the few existing legal and political initiatives were either revised or led to even stronger repressions against relatives and women's rights organizations.

On the first panel of the conference representatives of Latin-American organizations spoke about the current situation in their respective countries. Despite some legal advances, they reported an overall increase in feminicides. In Mexico, for example, legal institutions have been created but repression and a lack of legal protection prevent women, their families and women's rights organizations from calling upon the relevant institutions. The participants of the conference urged the European Union to put further pressure on these states.

On the second panel representatives of the European Commission, Amnesty International, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission and the upcoming Spanish presidency of the Council of the European Union spoke about progress and backlashes in the fight against impunity. In several working groups in the afternoon short, medium and long-term goals were discussed.

ECCHR will continue to engage in legal ways to create accountability in cases of violence against women. Within its program Gender and Human Rights, which starts in 2010, ECCHR aims to explore the polemic of gender aspects in international and national law and further develop the promotion and protection of human rights and its relationship to gender. Furthermore, ways shall be found how to enforce these rights and punish their violation.