The Initiative for Strategic Litigation will hold a litigation institute to interrogate states’ due diligence responsibilities to prevent and effectively respond to Violence Against Women in Africa.
Date: 3rd to 14th July,2023
The Litigation Institutes are a two-week long series of capacity strengthening activities that take place twice a year, over a three-year period of partnership with key partners involved in strategic litigation. The participants are feminist lawyers that are part of The Feminist Litigation Network [FLN], a centre piece of ISLA’s work that aims to develop a pool of African feminist litigators by providing quality and long-term support to strengthen their knowledge and practice on key issues related to Violence Against Women.
This will be the Fifth Litigation Institute of Phase Two of the Feminist Litigation Network and will be thematically focused on Violence Against Women and will take place in Johannesburg, South Africa. This institute will be part 2 of the due diligence theme, continuing from the first VAW litigation institute which introduced the principle of due diligence broadly. This institute will go deeper into practical ways of using strategic litigation in the context of the due diligence state obligation to enact laws to protect women from VAW, and specifically to address sexual violence and domestic violence. The first week will cover feminist legal methods; due diligence standards in international law; due diligence and state obligations to legislate on VAW; due diligence and protection from sexual violence; due diligence and domestic violence. The second week will cover practice and procedure particularly legal practice management and the moot court. The goal of the institute is to develop knowledge and skills on strategic litigation before various fora, provide sound knowledge on the use of comparative and international law in strategic litigation, endow participants with skills on using different human rights mechanisms and enhance understanding of feminist legal theories and their utility in advancing litigation on women’s rights, specifically on Violence Against Women (VAW) and Practices and Procedures (PP). The institute will be facilitated by faculty, which comprises both academic and legal practitioners with expertise in various thematic areas, incorporate theoretical and practical components throughout the institutes. The participants will be the members of the Feminist Litigation Network (FLN).
Notes to editors
About ISLA
– The Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa (ISLA) is a feminist and Pan-African organisation whose mission is to protect sexual and women’s human rights through litigation and capacity strengthening initiatives. We use the law to hold state and non-state actors accountable for human rights violations based on gender and sexuality. Using a rights-based framework, we endeavour to improve the lives of women, girls, and people whose rights have been violated based on gender, sexual identity and orientation; to highlight positive developments and emphasise cross-learnings from various countries on the continent; and seek to highlight and assert women’s leadership and contribution in the African human rights system while centering women’s voices and experiences in the jurisprudence to surface gender bias.
For more information about this event please contact:
Name: Santana Simiyu
Email: santana@the-isla.org