On 24 October, institutional stakeholders from Western Balkans and Eastern Partnership regions responsible for judicial data and gender policy, including Ministries of Justice (judicial statistics and legal policy departments), National Statistics Institutes, Istanbul Convention Coordination Bodies and Gender Equality Mechanisms, met in Budapest for a Roundtable on closing gender data gaps.

The roundtable created a high-level, yet practical space for key actors to bridge the legislative, statistical, and policy domains in a unified approach in line with Council of Europe and international gender equality standards. The event comes in the context in which, despite notable progress, the lack of consistent, sex and gender-disaggregated, and policy-relevant data remains a fundamental obstacle to designing and implementing gender-responsive justice reforms.

Access to justice is not gender neutral. Women and girls face distinct and often invisible barriers when interacting with the justice system, from discriminatory legal provisions and underreporting of gender-based violence, to gaps in judicial and police statistics that fail to reflect gendered patterns.

As one of the participants noted “there are a few reasons why gender data are essential:

• It allows us to see the full picture of gender inequalities, including its dynamics and relational dimensions.
• It makes inequalities visible, uncovering reporting, procedural, and outcome barriers in justice.
• It promotes accountability, transforming statistics into evidence of systemic failure or progress.
• It empowers victims through recognition, affirming that their experiences matter and must be seen and counted.

Gender data are human rights tools—instruments that make justice visible, ensure institutional accountability, and give meaning to the principle of equality before the law.”

This event was organised within the action “Women’s access to justice in the Western Balkans” and the project “Women's Access to Justice: implementing Council of Europe’s gender equality and violence against women standards”, which are respectively parts of the European Union/Council of Europe joint programmes “Horizontal Facility III for the Western Balkans and Türkiye” and “Partnership for Good Governance”.