In the first days of May 2025, the head of the Paraguayan Congress, Basilio Nunez, announced that President Peña will veto the Law “That Creates Specialized Courts and Tribunals in Matters of Violence within the Family Group“. The draft law had been sanctioned by the Senate on 23 April 2025 and has been causing controversies between gender advocates, the Ministry of Women, and lawmakers. The original draft, passed by the Upper House in 2024, had focused on violence against women specifically and was widely supported by civil society actors working on gender-based violence. The subsequent revision carried out in the Chamber of Deputies changed the gender focus and diluted it to the broader term of “family violence”, excluding the specific focus that was intended to provide for speedier resolution of cases of gender-based violence and for specialized courts that are better capacitated to deal with processes of violence against women. As part of the controversies surrounding the law, drafters of the original bill were accused of being influenced by international NGOs and foreign agendas.
The reformulation of the bill is part of a broader trend of regressing women’s rights, such as the ongoing legal initiative to eliminate the Ministry of Women and merge it with the Ministry of Children and Adolescents and the National Secretariat for Youth into a newly created Ministry of the Family. Civil society organizations have criticized the move arguing that the creation of the Ministry of Women was in itself result of the struggle of organized women from across civil society and established important public policies regarding the inclusion and participation of women, including indigenous women.
Both legal initiatives threaten to undo recent progress made towards gender equality, the protection of women’s rights, and women’s access to participation in decision-making. The discourses used by lawmakers to reject the original draft of the law question the motivation of Senators who are advancing gender equality and reproduce harmful anti-NGO discourses painting gender equality as a foreign agenda. The vetoing of these legal initiatives would mean that the current drafts are rejected and need to be returned to Congress. While this would be a positive development, anti-NGO and anti-gender discourses continue to be present in Congress as well as the broader society.