ELA - Latin American Justice and Gender Think Tank (Equipo Latinoamericano de Justicia y Género)

Access to justice

For women to claim for the effective fulfillment of their rights, access to justice must be ensured. In our view, access to justice is a right and the State has the duty to ensure it.
Access to justice can be considered from various aspects, even though they complement each other:
* Access per se, i.e. the possibility of reaching the legal system with a lawyer’s representation, something which is fundamental when turning an issue into a legal nature claim: * A justice service availability, i.e. the system provides the possibility of obtaining a fair legal ruling in a timely manner;
* The possibility of continuing with the whole process, i.e., that the parties involved are not forced to quit a legal action along the process for reasons beyond their will. In this sense, the system should provide the necessary resources and tools to guarantee this coverage, particularly for economically and socially disadvantaged sectors and groups (40 per cent of the population living under the poverty line, women who cannot attend the courts because they have no one to care for their children, those who attend with them, people with precarious jobs who miss their day pay for attending the court; people with difficulties to move, whether due to disabilities and/or for economic reasons, etc.). Therefore, when we propose cost-free access to justice, we do not only refer to the benefit of litigating with no expenses (as legal fees or experts’ fees) but also to transport rates and the lost of day pays implied;
* The knowledge of rights by citizens and of the means in order to exercise and acknowledge those rights and, specifically, the awareness of access to justice as a right and the subsequent State duty to deliver and promote it freely both in criminal and civil cases.