Iryna Periv, Head of the Lviv Polytechnic Centre for Free Legal Aid, Deputy Head of the University’s Centre for Legal Research on Gender Equality, Assistant Professor at the Department of Theory of Law and Constitutionalism, the Institute of Law, Psychology and Innovative Education, gave an interview to UN Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, on the occasion of International Youth Day.
Iryna Periv, 25, from Lviv, is an experienced lawyer and a dedicated representative of active Ukrainian youth who for about two years has been working with the Women’s Perspectives Centre on the Women’s New Horizons project, which is supported by UN Women and the Swedish government.
– First of all, I am a graduate student and teacher at the Institute of Law, Psychology and Innovative Education, Lviv Polytechnic National University. I want to defend my dissertation and publish a book about the Ukrainian women’s movement. Currently, there is a catastrophic lack of works on the Ukrainian women’s movement in the historical and legal dimension, especially on those women who were abroad or in exile. Sometimes I even feel guilty for those initiators who created history a hundred years ago, and now are unfairly forgotten.
I am proud to stay with my alma mater, where I can implement many great ideas and projects. Now I head the Centre for Free Legal Aid at our Institute. I work with a team of dedicated students. Most of them are energetic girls and young women. I learn a lot from them and appreciate their generation, although there is not much age difference between us. My male and female students are well-informed about various issues, open minded and free from prejudice.
In addition, I am the Deputy Head of the Center for Legal Research on Gender Equality at our Institute.
As part of my work with the Women’s Perspectives Centre, I provide primary legal aid to internally displaced women in the Lviv region. Among the most common legal problems they face are difficulties in obtaining social benefits, divorce, establishing the fact of a person’s death in the occupied territories and obtaining a Ukrainian death certificate, domestic violence, obtaining the status of a mountainous settlement resident for internally displaced persons, and entrepreneurship activities.
Together with the Centre for Legal Research on Gender Equality, we developed a chatbot and information materials on how to safely cross the border. These materials were distributed at railway stations and wherever there were large numbers of people, including women with children.
My message to young people all over the world is to believe in yourself, listen to yourself and go for your goal. We must be true to ourselves and support each other. And I urge the Ukrainian youth to read more and pay attention to those works that were written a long time ago, but are relevant now. Refer to the work by Olha Kobylianska, Irena Knysh, and Oksana Zabuzhko. Oksana Zabuzhko’s works have been translated into various languages, so when you meet with people you know or friends from other countries, be sure to give them at least one of her books. In this way, the world will know more about Ukraine, and Ukrainians will learn more about themselves.
The full text of the article is on the website of UN Women Ukraine.
