Argentinian President Javier Milei last week told the World Economic Forum in Davos that ‘radical feminism is a distortion of the concept of equality’.
Argentina is planning to remove femicide from its penal code, the administration of President Javier Milei has said, dealing another blow to women’s rights in the country.
Justice Minister Mariano Cúneo Libarona announced recently that the government intends to push a reform through Congress to eliminate the legal concept of femicide.
“This administration defends equality before the law enshrined in our National Constitution,” Cúneo Libarona wrote on X. “No life is worth more than another.”
Femicide — the murder of a woman by a man because of her gender — was added to Argentina’s penal code as a specific offence in 2012, and is punishable with a life sentence. However, the number of femicides has remained high since then, according to women’s rights campaigners, with hundreds of such killings reported each year.
About 295 femicides were recorded last year, compared to 322 in 2023 and 242 in 2022, according to data from the Femicide Observatory of the National Ombudsman’s Office.
“Eliminating femicide as a legal category would put women and girls at greater risk,” Mariela Belski, Amnesty Argentina’s executive director, wrote on X on Wednesday.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Milei criticised “the sinister agenda of wokeism” and said “radical feminism is a distortion of the concept of equality”.
“We have even got to the point of normalising the fact that in many supposedly civilised countries, if you kill a woman, it is called femicide,” the far-right populist said in his speech. “And this carries more serious punishment than if you kill a man simply based on the sex of the victim — legally making a woman’s life be worth more than that of a man.”
It is unclear when the proposed penal code reform will be presented to Congress and whether Milei’s minority government would have enough support to pass the measure.
Argentina has long been considered one of the most progressive countries in Latin America when it comes to gender equality and diversity measures, but Milei’s administration has taken aim at women’s rights since taking office in December 2023.
The Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity and the Undersecretariat for Protection Against Gender Violence were scrapped straight away, while schemes to help female victims of violence have been scaled back. Last November, Argentina was the only nation to vote against a UN resolution promoting the end of all forms of online violence against women and girls.
Milei’s administration is also seeking to repeal measures such as gender parity in electoral lists, labour quotas for sexual minorities, and non-binary identity documents.
His stance against what he calls “gender ideology” gained momentum this month following the inauguration of US President Donald Trump — an ally and admirer of Milei.
Hours after taking the oath of office last week, Trump signed an executive order ending diversity, equity and inclusion programmes within the US federal government, which he described as “dangerous, demeaning and immoral”.
Additional sources • AP
