Collaborations
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ISLA engages in research collaborations to ensure that thematic and priority areas are supported. Research support also enables ISLA to document and make visible the intellectual and scholarly contributions by feminist African thinkers, writers, and practitioners towards understanding the power of strategic litigation. To support its litigation, knowledge production and capacity-strengthening work, ISLA collaborates in the following ways:
Collaborations Supporting Litigation for Social Change
- Case Sourcing: Case-sourcing partnerships enable us to work with first responders, service providers, research organisations or legal practitioners to source new cases. We assist organisations who document human rights violations to be more deliberate in identifying and referring cases for strategic litigation. We also work with organisations that provide psycho-social support to include access to justice as part of the services offered to victims of violence and we partner with regional litigation networks to identify cases where we could intervene as third parties or amicus curiae.
- Case Collaborations: In countries where we don’t have network partners, we seek partnerships with practitioners who can partner with us to provide legal services, including legal representation. We are open to partnerships and are also approached by partners who would like us to provide research support, technical legal expertise and act as advisors to counsel.
Collaborations Supporting Producing Knowledge for Social Change
We engage in research collaborations to ensure that thematic and priority areas are supported. Research support also enables us to document and make visible the intellectual and scholarly contributions by feminist African thinkers, writers, and practitioners towards understanding the power of strategic litigation. To support our litigation, knowledge production and capacity-strengthening work, we collaborate in the following ways:
- Law Firms and Law Schools: As part of our collaboration with law firms, academic institutions and NGOs with in-house research capacity, we make requests for research support for different types of work on a variety of legal issues. Through these partnerships we are able to host interns and fellows from institutions that we partner with.
- ISLA’s Panel of Experts IPE: We work with the ISLA Panel of Experts (IPE) where we partner with African feminists who are lawyers, academics and practitioners from different disciplines to complement knowledge which informs our litigation, capacity strengthening and publications. The panel also serves to profile and make more visible the work of African feminist academics and legal practitioners in engaging and thinking about the links between law, sexuality and gender, and the meaning of developing human rights in Africa.
Influencing and Strengthening Regional Mechanisms
We work with a range of actors within the African human rights system. Through collective action and advocacy focused at a regional level, particularly the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), we focus on women’s and sexual human rights issues that the ACHPR can respond to or where civil society organisations can use the ACHPR to advance their advocacy. There are four main coalitions we work with under this thematic area:
- The Coalition for the Independence of the African Commission (CIAC)
- The Litigants Group
- The Women’s Platform
- SOGIE Advocacy
- ACHPR CSOs Side Events (ACSE)
Have a look at our Events page for upcoming capacity strengthening events. If you are able to self-fund attendance to any of our events, kindly contact the PKCS & SCLS Manager at emmah@the-isla.org.
About Us
Founded in 2014, the Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa (ISLA) is a Pan-African and feminist initiative with a timely remit: to strengthen strategic human rights litigation across the African continent. Essentially, we aim to change the way that strategic litigation is used so as to enable broader access to justice and to support those who seek to hold states accountable for violations of women’s human rights and sexual rights.
Contact Details
Contact Number:
+27 11 338 9028
Fax: +27 11 338 9029
Address: 87 de Korte Street,
South Point Corner, 7th Floor Braamfontein, 2017 Gauteng, South Africa