COMMUNITY

On March 17, in Brasilia, GQUAL and CEJIL organized the side event “Gender Parity, Democracy and Human Rights”, with the support of the Superior Labor Court and the Inter-American Commission of Women. This event was held within the framework of the public hearings convened by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights regarding the request for an Advisory Opinion on democracy and its protection in the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS).

The meeting brought together women judges, public officials, specialists and civil society organizations to affirm an idea that is now central to the regional legal debate: gender parity is a democratic principle and a measure of the right to equality in political and public participation.

In her remarks, Claudia Martin, member of the GQUAL Secretariat and Co-Director of the Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University, stated that gender parity in decision-making spaces is a measure for advancing the right to equality and for strengthening the legitimacy and impact of all institutions in any system of government.

Claudia Martin explained that equality cannot be understood solely in formal terms, since, in most cases affecting historically underrepresented groups, the law does not establish direct discrimination. Rather, exclusion operates through seemingly neutral social, institutional, and cultural structures that restrict real access to power.

She therefore emphasized that equality must be understood as substantive equality, because only from this perspective is it possible to identify the structural barriers that continue to exclude women from political and public life.

Within this framework, Martin also recalled that discrimination faced by women must be analyzed in light of Inter-American jurisprudence on equality and non-discrimination, particularly in relation to suspect categories. This means that when a distinction affects a historically subordinated group, the standard of review applicable to the State must be stricter and require a more demanding justification.

This reasoning leads to a conclusion that now occupies a central place in the regional debate: parity constitutes an essential democratic principle for the construction of legitimate, representative, and inclusive institutions.

The intervention of Inter-American Court of Human Rights Judge Verónica Gómez placed this discussion within the broader political context currently shaping the equality agenda. Her warning was clear: the beginning of the twenty-first century is also marked by a pattern of setbacks, despite advances that, for decades, had seemed firmly established. Debates that seemed settled—particularly those concerning the distinction between formal equality and substantive equality—are being reopened, while affirmative action and parity measures are encountering growing resistance across various political and social spheres.

Her reflection was particularly significant in underscoring that the struggle for parity does not take place in the abstract or along a linear path of progress. Rather, it unfolds at a historical moment in which various actors are seeking to weaken equality mechanisms precisely as these begin to more visibly disrupt the traditional distribution of power.

This political dimension was also reflected in the remarks of Ísis Táboas, Special Advisor to Brazil’s Minister of Women, who drew from an intervention heard during the hearings to highlight a point that is often absent from technical discourse: no matter how strong the legal arguments may be, this is also a struggle over power.

This observation is particularly revealing, as it shows that resistance to linking parity and democracy is not driven solely by interpretative disagreement, but also by the persistence of structures that resist the redistribution of power.

For her part, Alejandra Mora Mora, Executive Secretary of the Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM), connected the debate to the region’s accumulated experience and to the concrete tools that the Inter-American system has developed to strengthen women’s political participation. Her contribution underscored that parity is not a symbolic aspiration, but rather a concrete tool for making political rights effective and for translating normative commitments into measurable institutional change.

From the perspective of the CIM, Alejandra Mora also highlighted a key distinction: while quota-based systems tend to produce gradual advances, parity has the capacity to generate deeper transformations in decision-making spaces. For this reason, the current challenge is not only to defend it politically, but also to consolidate it as an interpretative principle capable of guiding the scope of the right to political participation.

The national dimension of the issue was also present in the interventions of Adriana Melonio, auxiliary judge of Brazil’s National Council of Justice, and Luciana Zaffalon, Executive Director of Plataforma Justa, who demonstrated how these debates take concrete form in the daily functioning of justice systems. In the Brazilian case, Melonio highlighted important normative advances, while noting that formal access alone does not eliminate structural inequality; while Zaffalon emphasized that underrepresentation also affects key institutions such as the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

Taken together, the interventions in Brasilia reaffirmed a central idea for regional advocacy: parity is not a sectoral objective or a peripheral demand within the equality agenda, but a structural principle of democracy.

In this sense, the process currently open before the Inter-American Court represents a historic opportunity to affirm more clearly that there can be no full democracy while half of the population continues to be systematically excluded from the spaces where decisions are made.