Corrine Kumar

Kumar established Vimochana in Bangalore in 1979. The organisation works on violence against women in its domestic and public forms, including dowry-related deaths, domestic violence, sexual exploitation and trafficking, and takes as its principle the feminist formulation that the personal is political. Its programmes include the Angala crisis intervention centre, rural community work, the Women in Black campaigns, open universities and gender sensitisation training. Vimochana states that it has worked with more than 30,000 women over more than forty years.

Kumar is a founding member of the Asian Women's Human Rights Council, and served for over twenty years as secretary general of El Taller International, an international non-governmental organisation based in Tunis working on women's human rights and North-South and South-South dialogue.

She founded the World Courts of Women in 1992. These are public hearings, organised around themes relevant to the country hosting them, at which women who are excluded from formal legal and political processes give testimony, and which combine those testimonies with expert evidence and a form of judgment. Vimochana records that around fifty such courts have been held worldwide, and that they were initiated by the Asian Women's Human Rights Council with collaborating women's rights groups.[2][3][4][5]