It was most interesting to attend the CSW70 side event titled ‘Access to Justice for Women and Girls: Strategies, Pathways and Good Practice’. The event was chaired by Jan Beagle, the director general of the International Development Law Organization (IDLO). Many of the participants at this event approached it from legal and political professions, with ideas and strategies around law-focused approaches to achieving justice for women.
In the lead up to the panel discussion, Beagle mentioned key reforms and ideas to be discussed and considered in working towards this goal. They included the necessity for essential legal reform needed to remove structural barriers to equality (such as discriminatory laws and legal gaps continue to undermine gender equality, particularly in areas such as property, inheritance, family law, and protection from violence). In doing so, she discussed the need to ‘make justice institutions work for women and girls and that requires transforming how justice systems operate’, including ‘[challenging] patriarchal views and persistent social norms’. Additionally, she underlined the need for women to be educated on their legal rights in order to access them. Beagle cited some of the current work being done by the IDLO to advance women’s rights through the law. The IDLO reportedly ‘engaged 36,000 community members (17,000 women and girls) in mobile legal aid clinics, radio programs, and public awareness campaigns’ and over the last two years ‘legal professionals supported by IDLO provided over 800 legal consultations to women and represented more than 400 cases in court on behalf of women clients’.
Panel members at this side event included representatives from the Pacific region, the Philippines, Italy and Australia. The World Bank, the American Bar Association and Rangita de Silva de Alwis (a United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women member) were also contributors to this event.
As an Australian, I was excited to hear directly from Padma Raman, the Executive Director of the Office for Women at the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, as she presented on concrete actions Australia is taking towards achieving gender equality and reducing gender-based violence during a time where a National Plan is in place to respond to reducing violence against women and their children in what was been declared in 2024 by our Prime Minister as a ‘national crisis’ of violence against women. She spoke about this whole-of-government gender equality strategy, Australia’s revised gender-responsive budgeting, the importance of our eSafety Commissioner’s powers in digitally upholding women’s rights, as well as a new social media ban for under 16s that limits access from a young age, making content (which can be especially for and to young girls) more age appropriate.
Other pathways to decreasing gender-based violence and legislating women’s rights included the following initiatives introduced at this event…
In the Pacific:
- An combination of GBV response and prevention as well as an engagement of men and boys working with indigenous judicial practice
- Spending of $13 billion US (between 2008 and 2021) on gender
It was noted that geography and travel limitations in the region continue to create barriers to access to justice for women.
In the Phillipines:
- Justice caravans have provided free legal aid to women
- Reforms of discriminatory laws have been made
- There has been an introduction of more guidelines for online sexual harassment, although there is plenty more work to be done in this space to protect women and children especially.
A representative from the Phillipines’ Supreme Court (Justice Maria Filomena Singh) discussed at length the presence of women in the legal sphere in the Phillipines. She noted an increase inwomen’s representation in judiciary with trial courts containing 58% women judges. A project of hers called “HerStory” that aimed to inspire women into law became very popular which she was proud of, but she lamented how structural and cultural barriers face women in more senior legal roles such as serving on their supreme court (18 women of 195 total members historically). These barriers included self-selection out of high flying roles and women still feeling impacts of familial duties to play care-giving roles which prevent them from attaining these high-up positions.
In Italy:
- There is a current national action plan in place towards achieving gender equality
- Italy has lead a series of high-level global conferences, working towards achieving SDG 16 (Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions) and justice for women
- There has been a recent new law that recognises femicide as a specific hate crime (2025) potentially punishable by life imprisonment.
In summary, the event discussed legal improvements and progress towards achieving women’s rights. It was emphasised that laws can improve things on paper, but that societal acceptance and enforcement of these laws determined their effectiveness and should also be a focus. Finally, women’s knowledge of and therefore access to these laws should be a global priority, because without knowing of their existence of how they could serve them to achieve justice makes them pointless.
Autor: Clare Tuckwell, Youth Intern, Australia
