Press Release: Countering Anti-Rights Actors Feminist Litigation Institute
PRESS RELEASE
6 July 2026
Countering Anti-Rights Actors Feminist Litigation Institute
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
In the coming days, the Countering Anti-Rights Actors (CARA) Feminist Litigation Institute will convene in Johannesburg, South Africa, bringing together lawyers from across the Feminist Litigation Network (FLN). Convened by the Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa (ISLA), the Institute will focus on strengthening feminist strategic litigation practice to protect and advance women and sexual rights amid rights regression and emerging legal and policy challenges.
Established in 2025, CARA is ISLA’s newest thematic area. It was created in response to growing challenges to the protection and advancement of women’s rights and sexual rights across national, regional, and international human rights systems. Against a backdrop of rights regression, legal, policy, and social developments are increasingly affecting the recognition, protection, and realisation of these rights, with significant implications for equality, non-discrimination, dignity, and social justice.
The CARA Litigation Institute recognises that challenges to the protection and advancement of women’s rights and sexual rights extend beyond the law, encompassing political, social, cultural, and ideological dimensions. For this reason, the Institute combines political education, substantive legal learning, and practical litigation training. It equips FLN lawyers with the knowledge and skills to understand the drivers of rights regression, navigate increasingly contested legal and policy environments, and effectively advance and defend human rights within and beyond the courtroom.
ISLA’s Litigation Institutes are intensive, practice-oriented capacity-strengthening programmes delivered under the FLN. They combine facilitated discussions, expert-led sessions, practical exercises, collaborative work, peer learning, and critical reflection. The CARA Litigation Institute will convene FLN network lawyers from across Africa to strengthen ongoing feminist strategic litigation practice at domestic, regional, and international levels.
Week One will focus on analysing the drivers and dynamics of rights regression, the evolving legal and policy landscape, and the use of litigation and other legal strategies to influence the interpretation and application of human rights protections. Sessions will examine the emergence, evolution of challenges to established human rights norms, freedom of expression as a site of rights contestation, the right to family and the ways in which family-centred narratives shape legal and policy debates; and strategic litigation approaches for advancing and safeguarding women’s rights and sexual rights.
Week Two will centre applied litigation practice. The network lawyers will engage in drafting exercises, litigation strategy development, written and oral assessments, and preparation for a moot court simulation. The programme will conclude with a moot court exercise that provides a practical opportunity to apply the Institute’s conceptual, substantive, and practice-oriented learning.
By the end of the Institute, network lawyers will be equipped to analyse the broader political, legal, and social dynamics shaping rights regression, identify emerging trends, narratives, and legal strategies that affect the protection and advancement of women’s rights and sexual rights within their jurisdictions, recognise lawfare and the distortion of human rights frameworks; and develop strategic litigation approaches to advance and safeguard human rights.
Faculty
The Institute faculty comprises ISLA staff and expert facilitators from partner organisations, who will lead the programme’s thematic and practical components.
Faculty members will facilitate modules on the evolving landscape of rights regression and contested human rights frameworks, as well as freedom of expression and strategic litigation.
About ISLA
The Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa is a feminist, Pan-African organisation that works to advance sexual rights and women’s human rights through strategic litigation, capacity strengthening, collaborations, and knowledge production. ISLA’s work is grounded in a rights-based and intersectional feminist approach that centres women as agents of change and uses strategic litigation to hold state and non-state actors accountable for violations of women’s rights.
ISLA’s work is guided by three goals:
- Jurisprudence – To develop jurisprudence through the courts to hold state and non-state actors accountable.
- Enabling Environment – To create an enabling environment for strategic litigation, with a focus on lawyers, social movements, and institutions that work on strategic litigation.
- Strengthening – To strengthen civil society to respond to threats and attacks that weaken civic space and human rights.
About the FLN
The Feminist Litigation Network is a pool of African feminist litigators who undertake strategic litigation on women’s human rights. The FLN strengthens both individual and organisational capacities for strategic litigation and supports the development of feminist litigators across the continent. Through this work, the FLN contributes to the development of feminist jurisprudence and to creating an enabling environment for strategic litigation.
The network lawyers in the current cohort are based at AdvocAid, Amnesty International Kenya (AIK), Chapter One Foundation (COF), FIDA Kenya, KELIN, Kituo Cha Sheria, Lawyers for Human Rights(LHR), Utu Wetu Trust, and the Women Lawyers Association of Malawi (WLA).
ENDS
Media Contact:
Kay Mahonde-Chaterera
Feminist Litigation Network Manager
kay@the-isla.org