Women’s Rights Initiative
The Lawyers Collective Women’s Rights Initiative (“LCWRI”)’s mission is the empowerment of women through law. This is based on the belief that law is an instrument of social change and can be used in different ways to further the constitutional and human rights of women. Since its inception in 1998, the LCWRI has been actively engaged with the entire legal regime of addressing the rights of women in law. Despite decades of concerted efforts by NGOs and civil society, the overall status of women and their legal entitlements still call for long struggles. Even today, women occupy a devalued position in society. This is manifested in different forms of grave human rights violations such as domestic / sexual violence, sexual harassment at the workplace, identity based gender violence and sex selective abortions to name a few. These forms of violence result in the negation of equality rights of women. It is also in the exclusion from all public spaces and spheres of activities such as meaningful employment. In the absence of a state sponsored social security network and unemployment guarantees, they become dependent on their male relatives for protection and support doing them further into the trap of violence. The LCWRI provides legal inputs to the women’s movement.
The LCWRI through its experience of providing legal aid to survivors of sex based discrimination, violence, abuse and crimes, has realised the need to analyse the working of the laws and investigate ground realities when it comes to implementing laws relating to women. At the LCWRI, our objective has always been to find out the efficacy and relevance of legislation and legal systems and recommend its better use, as well as to initiate and spearhead law reform processes, whenever required. Law reform recommendations are formulated by keeping in mind the lived realities of women. The recommendations put forth by the LCWRI are directed not only towards recognising equality rights of women but also towards creating an enabling environment in which such rights can be asserted. The LCWRI’s efforts in creating legal awareness are guided by the overall objective of empowering women. The work of the LCWRI has in the past years have focused on a wide range of issues such as domestic violence, sexual harassment at the workplace, sexual assault, reproductive rights, trafficking / commercial sexual exploitation, violence faced by victims of religious intolerance etc. Our most successful campaign has been the enactment of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act in 2005. The success of this campaign heralds in a new era of law making in which the demand for a law is articulated by the civil society and the content of the law is arrived at through a consultative process directed at consensus building. This successful experiment, at the initiative of the LCWRI, has demonstrated that the process of law making is no longer the sole preserve of the state but is participatory with civil society.
Read more : https://lawyerscollective.org/wri/
