On September 21st, 20-year-old Mihaela Berak died. A man with whom she had a short relationship, a police officer, is in custody and is suspected of having shot her with his service weapon.
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The death of the law student sparked a lively debate in Croatia about the failings of a victim protection system and the legal texts that determine the punishments imposed.
Because Mihaela had informed her relatives what she thought of the police officer she had briefly seen. “He’s fucking crazy,” she wrote in a message to her friends published in the press after his death. “Obsessive,” “deranged,” “manipulative to the last degree”… the words she used to describe him were clear.
“How is it possible that a man who a young girl concluded after just a few days of knowing was manipulative and coercive takes a physiological test and receives a gun permit?” asks Sanja Kastratovic of the women's rights group Adela from Osijek, Mihaela's hometown.
On November 25, the International Day Against Violence Against Women, protesters across Croatia demanded justice for Mihaela. And called for femicide to be included in the law, for all forms of violence against women to be converted into crimes rather than misdemeanors, and for police officers to be banned from carrying weapons outside of their duties.
At the beginning of September, conservative Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic announced a package of measures to combat violence against women and children. These include several changes to the penal code, including one aimed at making femicide a separate crime punishable by 10 to 40 years in prison.
In the European Union, only Cyprus and Malta have done the same.
“An Ocean of Sadness”
According to the EU, 2,300 women were killed by their partners or family members in Europe last year. In Croatia, which has a population of 3.8 million, 13 women were killed – 12 of them by a relative.
For activists, these numbers justify the urgency of changing the law.
“The Criminal Code should make it clear that femicide is an aggravating circumstance that requires particularly strict sanctions, long prison sentences,” explains Dorotea Susak, head of the Center for Women's Studies.
Some Supreme Court justices believe that enshrining femicide in law would constitute discrimination against men.
“Distinguishing between the murder of a woman, it appears that a woman's life is worth more than a man's,” Supreme Court justices ruled in October in a text posted on their website.
However, according to court President Radovan Dobronic, this opinion does not take into account the Istanbul Convention for the Protection of Women, which Croatia ratified in 2018.
This international agreement to protect women from domestic violence, marital rape, female genital mutilation, etc. is the world's first binding instrument to prevent and combat violence against women.
According to the Convention, “special measures necessary to prevent and protect women from gender-based violence are not considered discrimination,” emphasizes Mr. Dobronic.
For human rights organizations, the judges' arguments are not valid because the constitutional equality of men and women is violated on a daily basis. And that more than 90% of crimes against women are committed by men, adds Ms. Susak.
If the statistics show the need for a change in the law, for the lawyers interviewed by AFP, there is nothing that replaces prevention.
“The criminal code is the ultimate tool – but it does not solve the problem,” says Suncana Roksandic, a professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Zagreb.
“Changing the law is the easy part… We are still a patriarchal and conservative society,” recognizes Sanja Kastratovic.
Nothing will comfort the Berak family – says the victim's mother, Jadranka Berak, in a broken voice. No matter how long he spends in prison, whoever killed her daughter “condemned us to an ocean of sadness and ripped out half of our souls. Destroyed us.”