Justice: NGOs want legal provisions targeting women's killings in Mexico

NGOs want legal provisions targeting women's killings in Mexico: "More than 100 civic groups on Wednesday called on Mexico's Congress and state governments to classify slayings of women under a separate category that recognizes them as "crimes against gender equality."

In a notice published in the Mexico City daily El Universal, the coordinator of the National Citizens' Observatory for Femicide, or OCNF, Maria de la Luz Estrada, said on behalf of those groups that killings of women should be defined in the Mexican Criminal Code as "privation of a woman's life for reasons of gender.

A proposal being studied by the non-governmental organizations, experts and the Mexican lower house's Special Committee on Femicides is based on an Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling known as the "Cotton Field" case. The Mexican government has said it will abide by that San Jose, Costa Rica-based court's decision.

In the IACHR's Nov. 16, 2009, ruling, the court found that Mexico violated the rights to life, personal safety and personal liberty, as well as rights of the child and access to justice and legal protection, in the slayings of Claudia Ivette Gonzalez, Esmeralda Herrera and Laura Berenice Ramos Monarrez.

The bodies of the victims, two of them minors, were found in a cotton field outside Ciudad Juarez - Mexico's murder capital - in 2001."