Special procedure applicable to women submitted to a criminal process

Abstract

Over the last decades, within the comparative criminal procedure law, in latinamerican prosecution systems, several mechanisms have emerged, with the aim of giving penal procedure a greater dynamism, through the implementation of an accusatory system, adressed to ensure equal procedural opportunities, fundamentally access to justice, by including procedural figures to grant criminal justice system promptness, in order to avoid delays. In spite of the recent reforms of penal systems, it became evident how rights violations of women submitted to a criminal process take place, specially of those women with pretrial detention, and how the judiciary and penitenciary are stages where disparities remain unobserved, increasing the existing deeply-ingrained patterns in paraguayan society, and pursuing the same old model, despite legislative changes. For this reason, it is considered that at this point, a thoughtful and global discussion needs to be set, by approaching the fields of legal analysis and investigation that also includes the legislative, in order to identify and fully enforce the inherent principles of the penal system applicable to women that commit an unlawful act.