At This Year’s Last ASEF Speaker Series Lecture, We Answered the Question ‘Is Justice a Man Or a Woman?’

At this year’s last ASEF Speaker Series lecture, ASEF hosted dr. Veronika Fikfak, Associate Professor of International Law at the iCourts Center of Excellence at the University of Copenhagen, where she leads the ERC project Promoting Human Rights. Dr. Fikfak raised the question of whether the right is a woman or a man at the starting point of the lecture.

During the lecture, dr. Fikfak concretized the provocative question and explained that the research deals with what women judges can contribute to the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. What the lecturer and her research team found in the database of around 10,000 cases is that female judges put the victim at the forefront of deciding on compensation. The results of the research confirm the fact that the composition of the senate influences what the law is and how high the damages are.

In Europe, there is currently talk of automating the field. Due to the insufficient number of employees, it wants to introduce algorithms that would decide on human rights violations. This means that the algorithms would operate on the basis of current jurisprudence, where decisions were made mostly by male senates. Dr. Throughout the study, Fikfak finds that in compensation proceedings, there must be a situation where both voices are present, ie both men and women.

The event was hosted by ASEF Junior Fellow Tine Šteger.