Protecting the individual person and working for the society as a whole is a token of success.

Genoveva Tisheva (born 1957) currently is the managing director of the Bulgarian Gender Research Foundation. She has extensive experience in the fields of civil law, women’s human rights, gender equality, and socio-economic rights of women. She is working on issues of violence against women and trafficking in women. Genoveva is involved in the creation of a legal basis for combating violence. She initiated the drafting of a law on protection against domestic violence and successfully lobbied for its passage. The law was adopted by parliament on 16 March 2004.

Genoveva Tisheva was born in Sofia in 1957. As a child she had the opportunity to live in Rome, Italy, for about four years and later she studied in a French school in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Since an early age she has been used to an international and multicultural environment. A lawyer with an M.A. in law from Sofia University, she specialized in international human rights law in Strasbourg, France, and in international comparative law in Strasbourg and Trier, Germany. In 2004, she took a special course on development, law, and social justice in The Hague, Netherlands. Genoveva Tisheva developed high sensitivity to the problems of women and in-depth knowledge about the situation of violence against women and discrimination based on sex. In 1995, she developed partnerships with two new NGOs on violence against women in Bulgaria, Animus and Nadia. She helped provide psychological support to victims through these organizations and worked on legal regulations and policy on violence against women. In order to promote the new legal basis in the field of domestic violence, Genoveva established relations with lawyers sensitive to the issue and started working with them on a voluntary basis on a draft law for protection against domestic violence. In less than one year the draft was prepared by this group of lawyers. At the end of 2001, Genoveva found journalists who promoted her idea through the media by interviewing parliamentarians. Genoveva started a successful lobbying campaign with the members of parliament from the party in power for the adoption of the law. The draft law was reviewed by the Ministry of Justice and introduced in parliament in April 2003 with a big press conference. The law was adopted by parliament on 16 March 2004 .

Bulgarian Gender Research Foundation