In the new report published today, GREVIO, the Council of Europe’s independent expert group responsible for monitoring implementation of the Istanbul Convention, addresses progress made since October 2018 and identifies areas which require urgent action from the authorities of Montenegro in the thematic area of bringing support, protection and justice to victims of violence against women and domestic violence.
GREVIO welcomes the fact that since the adoption of its baseline evaluation report on Montenegro, the authorities have taken important steps to further align their legal and policy framework with the requirements of the Istanbul Convention. Most notably, following GREVIO’s suggestion, Montenegro adopted a National Plan for the Implementation of the Istanbul Convention. Further, legal amendments were introduced to better delineate the misdemeanour and the criminal offence of domestic violence, and the criminal law definition of domestic violence was aligned with the definition of the Istanbul convention. Another positive development is the improvement of data collection by introducing a new unified database shared by Centres for Social Work and the police, although significant challenges persist regarding data collection in law enforcement agencies, the judiciary, and the healthcare sector. Progress has also been made in relation to specialist support services with the establishment in 2024 of two new shelters for victims of domestic violence in the municipality of Bar.
While noting the progress, GREVIO has also identified areas which require urgent action by the authorities.
Harmful gender stereotypes and patriarchal attitudes persist in all sectors of Montenegrin society, including in the media and politics, and shape the attitudes of professionals dealing with victims or perpetrators, such as law-enforcement officers, prosecutors, judges, social workers, and healthcare professionals. Training of these professionals is thus urgently required. Psycho-social treatment programmes for perpetrators of violence should focus on behavioural change, and not only medical treatment.
Closely related to the issue of attitudes is an urgent need to improve the handling of cases of violence against women: there are serious shortcomings in ensuring swift and impartial response to such cases by law-enforcement officials, and in the processing of cases by courts in decisions on custody and visitation rights. GREVIO has further expressed concern about the effective protection of victims by emergency barring orders and protection orders due to the limited availability and/or use of such orders.
There is an urgent need to provide adequate resources to Centres for Social Work to enable them to adequately support victims of violence. As for healthcare services, GREVIO has underlined the need to provide privacy to victims when disclosing their experience of violence and to ensure the application of existing guidelines, including the priority treatment of victims. Co-operation between relevant agencies also needs urgent improvement.
It is also recommended ensuring appropriate resources for preventing and combating violence against women, including sustainable funding for women’s rights NGOs that run specialist support services for women victims; improve data collection on all forms of violence; adapt teaching material in formal education to promote gender equality and non-stereotyped gender roles, as well as to include in formal curriculums age-appropriate teaching on, inter alia, the notion of freely given consent in sexual relations, and the issue of violence against women. Access to longer-term financial assistance, social housing, and support to find employment was also urgently needed for women victims of violence. The urgency to make specialist support services available for all victims throughout the country was stressed in the report. As support for victims of sexual violence in Montenegro is currently extremely limited, the authorities should prioritise efforts to set up rape crisis and/or sexual violence referral centres.
GREVIO also pointed out the urgent need to ensure that mediation procedures in family law cases with a history of domestic violence do not constitute quasi-mandatory mediation; cases of violence in family law proceedings should be systematically detected, and judges should be required to proactively inform parties of the voluntary nature of mediation. Repeat questioning of victims by different entities in criminal procedures should be avoided, and the practice of conducting “confrontations” between victims and perpetrators in judicial proceedings discontinued; victims should effectively benefit from the possibility to testify without the presence of the perpetrator.
Finally, GREVIO warns that the emerging trend of introduction of a licensing system for service providers might hamper the high-quality provision of services to victims of violence against women and domestic violence, as the criteria for obtaining a licence are difficult to fulfil for small NGOs.
