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Legal Empowerment for Cultural Transformation: Key Takeaways from CSW70
In March, Namati, the Grassroots Justice Network, the Ugandan Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, FIDA Uganda, and EQUIS Justicia para las Mujeres convened a side event at the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70) in New York titled Legal Empowerment for Cultural Transformation: Taking on Anti-Gender Narratives and Norms.
The timely discussion was moderated by Denise Dora, Grassroots Justice Network Advisory Council member and a co-founder of THEMIS – Gênero Justiça e Direitos Humanos in Brazil, and featured the following speakers:
Here are a few key takeaways from CSW70:
- Recognition of legal empowerment: We’re glad to see legal empowerment and community paralegals explicitly featured in the CSW70 Agreed Conclusions, recognizing their vital role in ensuring women’s access to justice. However, we must also consider the potential risks of formally recognizing community paralegals and subjecting them to government oversight at a moment when civic space is closing and there is increasing backlash against feminist organizing.
- The “invisible” challenges of cultural norms: Even where legislation exists to protect women’s rights on paper, in practice, invisible cultural and social norms continue to drive discrimination. For example, domestic workers in Brazil face a combination of racism and sexism, which results in their work being undervalued and discrimination becoming embedded in legal and social systems. Inequalities in the home—such as care and household responsibilities, and limits on women’s ability to work or travel—act as practical barriers to women seeking legal and political empowerment.
- Legal empowerment as a critical solution: Legal empowerment is a source of powerful solutions to make progress towards more equitable gender norms. Legal empowerment results in personal transformation; for the first time, women and domestic workers see themselves as subjects of rights, empowering them to push for change by negotiating with employers or seeking redress for injustice. At the family level, women who go through the legal empowerment process negotiate roles in the home, redistributing household chores and care work. And at the community level, organizations like FIDA-Uganda work with cultural and traditional leaders to align traditional practices with constitutional and human rights. Finally, legal empowerment builds collective power and solidarity among women, enabling them to mobilize together to advance norm change.
- The anti-gender backlash and our movement’s response: The anti-gender movement is globally organized, well-funded, and intent on destroying feminist gains in areas like sexual and reproductive health and rights and women’s leadership in governance and decision-making. To counter this backlash, coalition-building, collaboration, collective power, and cross-movement learning and sharing is key. We cannot do this alone: working with feminist and other social movements, cultural leaders, and governments is key. By empowering women to know, use, and shape the law, legal empowerment builds the culture of democracy needed to keep women’s human rights alive against rising opposition. We must also reclaim digital spaces for feminist and justice organizing, while mentoring the next generation to build long-term power.
Next Steps
Building on our interventions at CSW, we hope to explore the following areas:
- Continuing to push governments and the international community to fund and recognize community paralegals—key to expanding access to justice—while preserving paralegals’ independence and safety, particularly in the light of growing repression;
- Collecting additional strategies and case studies to showcase good practices for shifting cultural norms, including partnerships between legal empowerment organizations and cultural or traditional leaders to address harmful practices;
- Exploring ways to make grassroots legal empowerment work financially sustainable while ensuring that community paralegals are properly supported and resourced; and,
- Continued learning and sharing among grassroots justice groups about what works to improve justice for women and communities and how we can collectively counter the growing anti-rights movement.
Calls to Action for Governments
- Fund and protect community paralegals to strengthen women’s access to justice. Community paralegals are doing critical work with women and communities to build their knowledge of rights and remedies and empower them to solve injustices. To close the justice gap for women, we need to resource community paralegals and the grassroots justice organizations supporting them—through mechanisms like the Legal Empowerment Fund—while pushing for ways to better recognize and protect these actors as they face growing threats and backlash.
- Partner with grassroots justice organizations. Governments should recognize the complementary role of grassroots justice organizations and partner with them to co-create policies that better serve women, girls, and communities, as well as to strengthen access to justice through legal aid, legal awareness, and paralegal accompaniment.
May 1, 2026 | Akhila Kolisetty
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