On “the Lost Treasure” of Feminist Revolutionary Legal Imagination

Natascia Tosel (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Verona)

This post offers an overview of my ongoing project RE-RIGHTING (Rewriting Rights: Feminist Legal Narra(c)tors, From Arendt to Women’s Courts) funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101150334.

Introduction: Unearthing a Lost Treasure

Hannah Arendt famously described revolutions as leaving behind a “lost treasure”¹: political capacities for acting together that appear fleetingly in moments of founding, only to then vanish from institutional memory. The history of women’s courts can be read in similar terms. Emerging from feminist struggles against the exclusions and false equality of formal law, these courts staged radical experiments in collective judgment, political narration, and epistemic refusal. Beginning with the first International Tribunal on Crimes against Women, held in Brussels in March 1976, these feminist practices of justice spread worldwide over the next half century.² Despite this, their legacy remains largely unstudied and insufficiently acknowledged, both in academic scholarship and in broader public discourse. In this post, I reconstruct the history of the Brussels Tribunal – the founding moment of women’s courts – and argue that two elements that emerged there, namely the ethics of witnessing and the exercise of legal imagination in rewriting rights, constitute a “treasure” that remains vital for us to inherit and preserve today, at a time of backlash against women’s rights.

§1 The Origins of Women’s Courts: The Brussels Tribunal

In 1974, when the United Nations announced that the following year would be declared International Women’s Year (IWY), a group of women gathered at the annual international feminist camp on FemØ, a small island several hours from Copenhagen, organized by the Danish women’s liberation movement, the Red Stockings. During that summer, discussions began to circulate about how feminists should respond to the UN initiative. For many of the women present, IWY appeared less as a genuine commitment to women’s emancipation and more as a hypocritical gesture — one meant to obscure the persistence of discrimination and the widespread maintenance of both institutional and extra-legal sexist practices by the very governments celebrating women.

Rather than simply rejecting IWY, the women at FemØ began to imagine counteractions that would be at once critical and constructive. Only on the final day of the camp did a decisive idea take shape: the creation of a Tribunal on Crimes against Women. From that moment onwards, the project developed quickly. Women from the Frauenzentrum in Frankfurt volunteered to carry the initiative forward, organizing an International Feminist Conference to develop and launch the Tribunal. When the conference convened in November 1974, it brought together more than 600 women and laid the groundwork for what would soon become an unprecedented feminist legal experiment.

At the Frankfurt conference organised by the Frauenzentrum, the rudiments of the Tribunal’s organizational structure were established. National committees were formed and tasked with raising awareness of crimes against women within their own countries, deciding through consultation with women and women’s groups which crimes should be publicly testified to, and identifying women willing to speak. The Tribunal was initially planned for November 1975, deliberately timed to coincide with International Women’s Year as a direct response to it. Organizational and financial difficulties, however, forced a postponement, and the Tribunal was eventually rescheduled for March 1976. Brussels emerged as the chosen site after the Belgian Minister of Dutch Culture, Rika De Backer, offered the Palais des Congrès free of charge for the duration of the event. What had begun as a collaboration between only eight countries after the Frankfurt conference expanded rapidly: by the time the Tribunal opened, it included women from forty countries as participants.

Simone de Beauvoir had agreed to attend when the Tribunal was still scheduled for 1975, and although she was unable to be present after the postponement, she sent a letter that was read at the opening session. The organizing committee deliberately chose not to invite other prominent feminist figures, even though their presence might have attracted greater media attention. Instead, they insisted that the Tribunal centre its attention on the more than 2,000 women who travelled from across the world to testify. As one of the organisers Diane Russell explained, the Tribunal was not a meeting for feminist leaders, but rather a gathering “in which the willingness to talk about having been a victim of sexist oppression was the best qualification going”.³

The Tribunal opened on March 4, 1976 with the reading of de Beauvoir’s letter, inaugurating the event as what she called the beginning of “a radical decolonization of women”.⁴ Over the following days, testimonies unfolded, organized according to the crimes being borne witness to. Women spoke in their mother tongues, with simultaneous translation provided in French, Spanish, English, German, and Dutch. The translations were often imperfect — many translators were students and volunteers — but this did not diminish the force of what emerged: a dense, at times unruly polyphony of voices insisting on being heard, even when full comprehension was impossible.

§2 The Ethics of Witnessing

Jill Stauffer names the injustice of not being heard ethical loneliness. As she describes it, ethical loneliness is “a condition undergone by persons who have been unjustly treated and dehumanized by human beings and political structures, who emerge from that injustice only to find that the surrounding world will not listen to, or cannot properly hear, their testimony — their claims about what they suffered and about what is now owed to them — on their own terms”.⁵ Ethical loneliness thus names the experience of having been abandoned by humanity, compounded by the injustice of not being heard. It was precisely in response to this shared condition that the very idea of creating a Women’s Tribunal emerged. Among the many possible initiatives that could have been organized to counteract the UN’s declaration of International Women’s Year, the Tribunal was the only one that directly addressed the need for women to testify to their own experiences of suffering, discrimination, violence, and dehumanization — and, crucially, to be heard.

The organizers of the Tribunal emphasized this point in the published proceedings, underscoring the power of personal testimony to reveal common structures of oppression and to politicize them as grounds for collective action. This commitment to witnessing was further reflected in a decisive organizational choice: the total absence of judges. In the first Women’s Tribunal, bearing witness was not conceived as an auxiliary function, supplying evidence for a panel of judges tasked with delivering verdicts or sentences. Rather, testimony itself constituted the core of the Tribunal and was understood as a potential source of what the organizers called a “new structure of thinking”. Unlike other feminist initiatives or conferences, where efforts often focused on analysing the causes of women’s oppression and evaluating competing strategies for change, the Tribunal sought to ground future analyses and political proposals in lived experience. As the organizers explained, if one wished to understand the problem of wife battering in England, one should hear from a woman who had lived through it, rather than solely from a researcher offering abstract description and analysis.⁶ What is missing from these latter is the need to learn through, and to be informed by, “feelings, not just intellect”.⁷

As Kelly Oliver argues in her acclaimed book Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, witnessing carries a constitutive dual meaning, marked by an irresolvable tension, that also serves to make every testimony personal and unique. On the one hand, witnessing refers to eyewitness testimony grounded in firsthand knowledge; on the other, it names the act of bearing witness to something that cannot be fully seen or recognized — namely, how a subject experienced and lived through what happened to her.⁸ What renders testimony unique is not merely the fact that the witness was present to the event on trial, but how and why she was there. From this perspective, the decision to have multiple women testify to the same type of crime at the Brussels Tribunal can be read not as a repetition of facts, but as an effort to learn from the singular ways in which different women worked through similar experiences.

The uniqueness of testimony, in the context of the Tribunal, coincided with the uniqueness of its performance: the narration of a story which, as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub observe, “like an oath, cannot be carried out by anybody else”.⁹ This is precisely why the power of witnessing constitutes the first great “treasure” of the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women. While the crimes perpetrated against women were — and remain — widely known, listening to women bearing witness to violence requires a different ethical and political posture, one that women’s courts actively put into practice and from which we still need to learn today if feminist justice is to be reimagined. The ethics of witnessing enacted by the Brussels Tribunal calls for a politics of listening that is by no means easy. It calls on each and every one of us to be responsive to painful and often faltering attempts to narrate the impossible. In bearing witness, those who testify are not merely repeating facts; they speak from within experiences of objectification aimed at dehumanizing and destroying the self, and struggle to reinsert the perspective of that self into the world. The Tribunal thus became a forum in which ethical loneliness could be interrupted, if only temporarily, by the presence of many women willing to listen.

§3 Rewriting Rights: Feminist Legal Imagination

Alongside offering women a space in which the injustices they had suffered could finally be heard, the tribunal format introduced a second decisive element: the possibility of redefining crimes themselves and rejecting their existing “patriarchal” definitions. In this respect, Diane Russell recalls that the organizers of the Women’s Tribunal looked to an important precedent: the first people’s tribunal, the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Crimes Committed by the United States in Vietnam, held in 1966. That tribunal, Russell explains, had demonstrated how “oppressed peoples have the right to dissociate themselves from those definitions of crimes which have been developed by their oppressors to serve their own interests.” Inspired by this example, the Women’s Tribunal paid careful attention to the political work of naming, undertaking to rename crimes and rights violations in ways that were more responsive to women’s experiences and more capable of imagining remedies for these forms of injustice.

For contemporary readers, the list of crimes testified to at the Brussels Tribunal can initially provoke a sense of disorientation, especially for those expecting familiar, legally recognized categories. Instead, the Tribunal put to work a radically different vocabulary. Crimes included “forced motherhood”, referring to the denial of the right to abortion, and “compulsory non-motherhood”, denouncing the coercion — particularly of women from the Global South, but also of lesbians and unmarried women — into adoption or forced sterilization. Testimonies addressed “crimes perpetrated by the medical profession”, especially the brutality inflicted on women during childbirth; “compulsory heterosexuality”, naming the persecution and discrimination of lesbians; and “crimes within the patriarchal family”, pointing to institutionalized forms of domination exercised by husbands. The category of “economic crimes” captured discriminatory policies in areas such as social security, taxation, and family law that enforced women’s economic dependence on men, while “sexual objectification of women” referred to the structural violence embedded in prostitution and pornography.

The list also encompassed multiple forms of direct violence against women — from rape to femicide, a term that is still debated today but which participants considered necessary to articulate what they called the “sexual politics of murder”. In addition, the Tribunal addressed overlapping forms of discrimination through what we would now recognize as an intersectional lens, including the “dual oppression of women by family and economic structures”, as well as the compounded injustices faced by Third World women, immigrant women, and women from religious minorities.

Taken together, these practices can be understood as an exercise in feminist legal imagination. Renaming a crime was not merely descriptive; it was a performative act that asked what might change if such names were granted legal and political force. How different might a trial, a parliamentary debate, or even a public conversation become if the issue at stake were not “abortion”, but forced motherhood? Not a husband’s obligation to maintain his wife, but economic crimes against women? This was precisely the “new structure of thinking” the organizers of the Brussels Tribunal sought to create, and it remains an illuminating example of what is still urgently needed today: the capacity to imagine the world, and the legal categories that regulate and describe it, otherwise.

Conclusions

The experience of the first International Women’s Tribunal showed it to be far from a perfect model. As Diane Russell herself acknowledges, the three days of the Tribunal were marked by disagreements and moments of tension — among participants, between participants and organizers, and between organizers and the media, particularly over the decision to exclude male journalists. The Tribunal did not culminate in a verdict, but instead closed with a session devoted to solutions, resolutions, and proposals for change, during which many women openly criticized aspects of the Tribunal’s organization and some of the decisions that had been made.

Nevertheless, as the organizers later observed, despite these controversies, no one fundamentally questioned the tribunal format itself. On the contrary, even proposals that sharply diverged from the organizational choices of the Brussels Tribunal envisioned future initiatives in the form of new women’s courts. In this sense, the two elements highlighted in this post — the ethics of witnessing and the rewriting of rights — appeared crucial to participants as ways of beginning something new. From the Brussels Tribunal onward, women’s tribunals and courts, adopting diverse formats and pursuing different aims, were organized across the world over the following half century.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding moment, with the 50th Anniversary Tribunal on Crimes against Women taking place in Brussels and Antwerp from March 25^th to 28^th.¹⁰ The call to reimagine feminist justice made fifty years ago remains unresolved. The legacy of women’s courts and tribunals is therefore not only something to commemorate, but something we are called to inherit at present. We must renew our understanding of the “forensic” and recognize it not as what pertains solely to courts of law, but rather, in its original sense — from the Latin forensis — as what pertains to the forum¹¹: a plural space of appearance, negotiation, and collective action.

---

1. Hannah Arendt (1963) On Revolution. New York: The Viking Press, p. 217. ↩︎
2. https://vimochana.co.in/courts-held-so-far/ ↩︎
3. Diana E. H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven (1965) Crimes Against Women: Proceedings of the International Tribunal. Berkeley: Russell Publications, p. 9. ↩︎
4. Ibid., p. 5. ↩︎
5. Jill Stauffer (2015) Ethical Loneliness. The Injustice of Not Been Heard. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 1. ↩︎
6. Diana E. H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven (1965) Crimes Against Women cit., p. 152. ↩︎
7. Ibid. ↩︎
8. Kelly Oliver (2001) Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ↩︎
9. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, p. 206. ↩︎
10. https://www.2026women.org/tribunal/ ↩︎
11. Forensic Architecture (ed) (2014) Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. Berlin: Sternberg Press. ↩︎