Compensatory Women's Rights Legal Education in Eastern Europe: The Women's Human Rights Training Institute

To compensate for the absence/minimization of women's rights in the law faculty curriculum in post-socialist states, in 2002 a coalition of women's rights NGOs, funded by OSI, developed a Women's Human Rights Training Institute (WHRTI) in Sofia, Bulgaria. Now embarking on its sixth cycle and having graduated more than 100 lawyers (mostly working in NGOs in post-socialist states), WHRTI has developed a women's rights legal education and training program triad consisting of feminist legal theory, women's rights legal practice, and feminist legal pedagogy. The goal of the program is to educate and train lawyers to understand and use various domestic, regional, and international fora to bring cases of sex/gender inequality. WHRTI's program has measurable and qualitative impacts and can be tailored to meet the need for compensatory education in other regions where a women's rights educational deficiency exists in law faculties' curricula.