Enabling Environment for Social Accountability in ... - SASANet

Two issue areas in which collaboration with public officials have resulted in impressive accomplishments
are the passage of a DV law and government funding for the NCAV shelters. Nevertheless, the Center
continues to advocate for the state to assume responsibility for the shelters and the development of
additional shelters as stipulated by the new Law Against Domestic Violence.
LEGAL ADVOCACY FOR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE LEGISLATION
The NCAV has advocated extensively for legal reform on DV, beginning with its campaign to reform
Mongolia’s Family Law, which had not been amended since its adoption in 1972. The 10 amendments
that were adopted in 1999 incorporated various NCAV’s proposals, including the redefinition of the
family home as shared property between husband and wife despite the tradition of male bias in Mongolian
culture. The NCAV along with the WLA, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
Against Women (CEDAW) Watch, and the Center for Human Rights and Development, continued to
advocate for specific legislation on DV in the Criminal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure, which
were passed in 2002. NCAV’s collaboration with other CSOs was critical to the successful legal advocacy
for DV legislation (Finding NCAV 2).
Despites its successful advocacy for reform of family law and criminalization of DV, the NCAV felt that
such piecemeal legislative reform could not address such a widespread social problem. Since its
inception, the Center had lobbied for the passage of a comprehensive DV law. The idea met with
considerable opposition at first since such a law seemed to counter family values and Mongolian culture.
Some MPs trivialized the problem by ridiculing, for example, the idea of sending someone “to jail just
because of slapping a wife once.” Some opponents to DV legislation (especially legislators and legal
professionals) claimed that the reforms to the Family Law and Criminal Code had sufficiently addressed
domestic violence.
The NCAV and its partners, therefore, took a two-pronged approach to advocate for a DV law. The first
part of their strategy was to develop a better conceptual understanding of and support for a DV law
among a coalition of nongovernmental partners working on human rights and issues related to women,
children, and the elderly. Through their various efforts, the NCAV and its CSO partners provided critical
information on DV to public officials as well as the general public (Finding NCAV 3).
The second prong of their strategy was to lobby key public officials in the legislative, executive, and
judicial branches at all levels of government. This networking and collaboration with government
officials permitted the NCAV greater access to Information, ability to Voice its concerns about the need
for DV legislation, and opportunities to Negotiate the content of the legislation (Finding NCAV 4).
Various tools were deployed in their advocacy efforts. These included polling among MPs, appearances
on TV talk shows, articles in the print media publicizing international experiences with DV laws, seminar
discussions with parliamentarians at the National Human Rights Commission, and collective letters from
shelter victims to the president, speaker of parliament, and prime minister.
The NCAV provided extensive studies and surveys to demonstrate the need for a special law on DV.
These included a national baseline survey of 5,000 respondents conducted jointly with the Ministry of
Population Policy and Labor (1995); a follow-up survey with 3,000 respondents conducted with the
Center of Training and Research for Population of the National University of Mongolia (1998); regular
surveys of shelter clients and analysis of the NCAV’s own records of legal and psychological counseling
(1995–2003); a study on the impact of child abuse in the family (2001); a study of forensic hospital
records (2003); and a survey of the effect of DV on elders conducted jointly by the NCAV and the