Argentinian President Javier Milei final week informed the World Financial Discussion board in Davos that ‘radical feminism is a distortion of the idea of equality’.
Argentina is planning to take away femicide from its penal code, the administration of President Javier Milei has stated, dealing one other blow to girls’s rights within the nation.
Justice Minister Mariano Cúneo Libarona introduced not too long ago that the federal government intends to push a reform by means of Congress to get rid of the authorized idea of femicide.
“This administration defends equality earlier than the regulation enshrined in our Nationwide Structure,” Cúneo Libarona wrote on X. “No life is value greater than one other.”
Femicide — the homicide of a girl by a person due to her gender — was added to Argentina’s penal code as a particular offence in 2012, and is punishable with a life sentence. Nevertheless, the variety of femicides has remained excessive since then, in response to girls’s rights campaigners, with tons of of such killings reported every year.
About 295 femicides had been recorded final yr, in comparison with 322 in 2023 and 242 in 2022, in response to information from the Femicide Observatory of the Nationwide Ombudsman’s Workplace.
“Eliminating femicide as a authorized class would put girls and women at higher danger,” Mariela Belski, Amnesty Argentina’s government director, wrote on X on Wednesday.
Talking on the World Financial Discussion board in Davos final week, Milei criticised “the sinister agenda of wokeism” and stated “radical feminism is a distortion of the idea of equality”.
“We’ve got even received to the purpose of normalising the truth that in lots of supposedly civilised international locations, should you kill a girl, it’s referred to as femicide,” the far-right populist stated in his speech. “And this carries extra critical punishment than should you kill a person merely primarily based on the intercourse of the sufferer — legally making a girl’s life be value greater than that of a person.”
It’s unclear when the proposed penal code reform shall be introduced to Congress and whether or not Milei’s minority authorities would have sufficient assist to move the measure.
Argentina has lengthy been thought-about one of the crucial progressive international locations in Latin America on the subject of gender equality and variety measures, however Milei’s administration has taken intention at girls’s rights since taking workplace in December 2023.
The Ministry of Ladies, Genders and Variety and the Undersecretariat for Safety In opposition to Gender Violence had been scrapped right away, whereas schemes to assist feminine victims of violence have been scaled again. Final November, Argentina was the one nation to vote towards a UN decision selling the top of all types of on-line violence towards girls and women.
Milei’s administration can be in search of to repeal measures corresponding to gender parity in electoral lists, labour quotas for sexual minorities, and non-binary identification paperwork.
His stance towards what he calls “gender ideology” gained momentum this month following the inauguration of US President Donald Trump — an ally and admirer of Milei.
Hours after taking the oath of workplace final week, Trump signed an government order ending range, fairness and inclusion programmes inside the US federal authorities, which he described as “harmful, demeaning and immoral”.
Further sources • AP