DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND RIGHT TO BE FREE FROM TORTURE

Abstract

This article examines the development of the international human rights law, and its
application by the international monitoring bodies as well as courts, with respect to
violations of the right to be free from torture and inhuman and degrading treatment by
victims of domestic violence.
Domestic violence is one of the most spread forms violence against women that feeds
on inequalities in society such as discrimination against women. As a global average,
at least one in three women is beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused by an
intimate partner in the course of her lifetime. Once domestic violence was viewed as
belonging to the realm of the private sphere, and thus exempt from the state
responsibility under the accepted obligations through being a party of certain
international human rights instruments
However, over the past two decades, international human rights documents, decisions,
work of dedicated advocates for women’s rights have popularized the issue of domestic
violence moving it on the international agenda and out of the gray area of regulation,
i.e. the private sphere. It has become clearer that the main threat to human rights did
not always come directly from the state. Therefore, the need to use the human rights
law in intervening in the private sphere has increased. Thus a number of regulations,
interpretation, monitoring and elaborations of state responsibility for acts in the private
sphere has started to emerge.
Finally, the rights of women victims of domestic violence have found it self on high on
the international agenda’s, being confirmed by the jurisprudence of the ECtHR in the
latest cases. Moreover, the Court confirmed that the acts of domestic violence against
women constitute a violation of the right to be free form torture and inhuman and
degrading treatment as well recognized the positive obligations that states have to
prevent such occurrences and to protect victims.