Professor Jill Marshall took part in a meeting at Strasbourg University on 17 May 2024 with judges from the European Court of Human Rights and other academics to discuss how feminist ideas can shape judgment writing.

This meeting results from Feminist Judgments in International Law (edited by Dr Loveday Hodson and Dr Troy Lavers of the University of Leicester Law School who organised and participated in this event) to which Jill contributed a chapter with two other academics, Professor Amel Alghrani and Dr Amal Ali.

Judges from the European Court of Human Rights (the ECtHR) and six academic authors to the collection from Leicester, Oxford, and the University of London, including Jill, came together to explore how feminist theory and methods can be used by judges when deciding the outcome of legal international cases. The event also involved introductory and concluding panels with judges and academics, including from the host Strasbourg University. It was attended by academics and students.

Using examples taken from the book, participants explored how adopting different approaches to judgment writing can lead to different outcomes in international cases. They did this by summarising the feminist re-writing of the judgment from the ECtHR after one of the current judges of that court summarised the actual judgment and commented on the rewritten judgment. Topics of discussion included cases on abortion rights, domestic violence, gender identity, freedom of expression, and bans on wearing Islamic headscarves (this was Jill’s topic, on the case of Sahin v Turkey).

The discussion had wide-reaching implications for thinking about how to make international judgments more just and inclusive.