30/12/2015, Belgrade: Autonomous Women Center has been revising the proposal of National strategy for gender equality for the period 2016 – 2020 in three areas of interest – violence against women, safety and cooperation with associations, and based on analysis of Strategy and accompanying Activity plan for strategy implementation, including abridged report on evaluation of previous strategic document, AWC developed comments.

The key deficiency of the National strategy, for the three stated topics, is declarative nature of referring to the long list of international treaties, recommendations, reports, domestic laws ans strategies, including large number of researches, analysis and reports. That has direct effect on the type and quality of suggested goals, measures, activities, indicators, but also concrete evaluation recommendations.

In the area of violence against women, the narrow range of types of violence is stated (exclusively violence in partnerships and domestic violence), the key problems in this area are missing, measures are superficial and of uneven generality, important measures are missing, there is inconsistent relation between measures and planned activities, separated elements of activities that don't respond to measures or the essence of the problem, badly set goal values, indicators and outcomes.

The process is criticized for the lack of public debate on the proposal of the new strategic document which is in opposition with Guidelines for inclusion of civil society organization in the decision making processes.

Comments are available in Serbian here.