This introductory episode presents Women’s Courts as people-led, non-official tribunals created to confront forms of violence and injustice often unheard or unrecognized within formal legal systems. Bringing together testimony, collective listening, and political imagination, Women’s Courts open alternative spaces of judgment and visibility. The episode explores their key features and enduring significance as experiments in rethinking justice from below, and introduces the structure of the series: each episode reconstructs the history of a Women’s Tribunal paired with a key feminist concept. It also presents the Marie Skłodowska-Curie research project RE-RIGHTING “Rewriting Rights”, funded by the Horizon Europe programme, of which this podcast is an outcome.

Audio Sources:

• Finding Justice for Sexual Slavery Survivors: The International Women's Tribunal by LSE.

• Women's Court: Feminist Approach to Justice.

This episode revisits the first International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, held in Brussels in 1976. Organized by feminist activists and bringing together testimonies from women across the world, the tribunal created an unprecedented public forum where experiences of violence — often ignored or dismissed by legal and political institutions — could be spoken, heard, and collectively acknowledged. Reconstructing the history of the tribunal, the episode explores both its political ambitions and its internal tensions, from debates over representation to disagreements about its organization and outcomes. At the heart of this experiment lies a crucial question: what does it mean to witness? By foregrounding testimony and collective listening, the Brussels Tribunal articulated an ethics of witnessing that would shape many later Women’s Courts and continue to challenge how we think about justice, responsibility, and public judgment.

Sources:

• Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge.

• Forensic Architecture (ed) (2014) Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

• Kelly Oliver (2001) Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

• Diana E. H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven (1965) Crimes Against Women: Proceedings of the International Tribunal. Berkeley: Russell Publications.

• Jill Stauffer (2015) Ethical Loneliness. The Injustice of Not Been Heard. New York: Columbia University Press.

• Natascia Tosel (2026) Fifty Years of Women's Courts. On the "Lost Treasure" of Feminist Revolutionary Legal Imagination. SAFI Network. Published on line on 16/02/2026.