Brief – Legal Empowerment
Thematic Stream: Legal Empowerment
Problem: As per The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, target 16.3 promises to “ensure equal access to justice for all.” However, the goal is largely unmet with the World Justice Project reporting that globally 5.2 billion people i.e. two-thirds of the world’s population face justice issues.
Globally, 1.5 billion people cannot obtain justice for criminal, civil and administrative issues due to various structural obstacles that hinder their access to justice institutions and around 4.5 billion people are excluded from opportunities the law provides due to lack of legal tools.
In the case of Pakistan, justice to legal institutions remains largely inaccessible for marginalized and disempowered communities either due to structural hurdles or lack of legal tools (such as identification documents). While the country has made substantial strides in terms of legislating, the implementation of said legislation to provide justice for all remains largely unmet. Lack of access to justice creates an environment where there is no equal opportunity and the marginalized are discriminated against.
Goal: To educate, empower, and build the agency of all communities so they’re able to access justice.
Approach: With the belief that unless marginalized, disempowered and discriminated sections of the society exert their legal rights and enjoy complete protection of the law, the law has no moral and legal standing, communities all across the country are being educated and empowered to know and use the law through a toll-free legal advice helpline & legal clinics.
Components:
Legal Advice Helpline:
A flagship project of the organization, the Sindh Legal Advisory Call Center (SLACC) provides free of cost and immediate access to legal advisors for all citizens, six days a week between 0900 to 1800. Started in 2014, the helpline connects callers directly with a licensed lawyer that guides the caller through any legal issue they may be encountering.
The call center, which originally started off as the Legal Advisory Call Center (LACC) in 2014, initially had the capacity to attend 12 concurrent calls at a time. In 2018, the call center, through a public-private partnership with the Government of Sindh was converted into Sindh Legal Advisory Call Center (SLACC).
SLACC, under the Legal Empowerment of People Program in Sindh (LEPPS) has been working towards providing free legal advice and information to empower the poor, disempowered and marginalized people of Pakistan. Since its inception in 2014, the SLACC has received over 327,605 calls on its IVR (Interactive Voice Recording) system and registered 144,867 legal queries from more than 450 cities and towns, across Pakistan. SLACC deals with calls relating to Civil laws (including family, contract, banking, labour, property and rent laws); Criminal laws (including contempt of court, trial procedure, cybercrimes, gender based violence and narcotics law); Public Service law (including issues relating to education, electricity and gas, Constitution and fundamental rights, BISP etc.); and General Information (including questions relating to NADRA, Ushr and Zakat etc.)
Legal Awareness Clinics:
Access to justice for the general public is often hindered due to exorbitant fees of lawyers and lack of access to the judiciary system. As one of its flagship legal empowerment strategies, LAS takes the lawyers [knowledge of law to the doorsteps of the disempowered….] to the people not only to educate them on their legal rights but also to provide them with advice on how to tackle their issues before formal administrative or justice systems.
Community legal awareness sessions are conducted across targeted districts where in the first instance, community members in small groups with an emphasis on male and female participation are educated on their legal rights through IEC material in their native languages and then given legal advice through field advocates who accompany the field trainers on these clinics. Legal Awareness clinics are utilized as a sub-component of nearly all thematic streams at LAS such as legal rights for religious minorities, legal property rights for women, and alternative modes for dispute resolution.
To this day, LAS has conducted 1,324 legal clinics across various districts in Sindh through which a total of 37,087 people have benefitted with 23,465 women, 13,55 men and 68 transgenders.