LEGAL SERVICES

Overview

Main Objective of the Legal Services component

One of the specific objectives of HRDI is to contribute towards the development of human rights jurisprudence, particularly, within the domestic, regional, community and eventually international human rights enforcement machinery. The legal services component of HRDI is dedicated towards the achievement of this objective. Although we aim to represent our clients before international tribunals we share the views of one of the guest teachers to our training programme, Prof Diego Rodriguez, that international litigation is not necessarily a sign of success in legal services provision, but should instead be interpreted as a failure since the client has failed to get justice where it matters most – the domestic system. International litigation is fraught with problems such as exorbitant costs, delays and most importantly states' unwillingness to enforce judgments of international tribunals hence the need to obtain justice at ‘home’. However, even as cases are being addressed within the domestic system, HRDI's aim is to ensure that domestic, regional, community and international human rights tools are strategically used.

Approach to Litigation

We take  both a reactive and proactive approach to litigation. With the former, our partners attend to clients who bring different human rights cases to their clinics thus reacting to issues presented by clients. With the latter our students proactively approach CBOs before attending the five month training programme with the aim of establishing what the communities deem the most pressing human rights issues. Some of the issues that have surfaced from these communities include discrimination against widows and orphans with respect to their inheritance rights; effective access to treatment (access to medicines, food and water); discrimination on the basis of HIV status in the workplace; HIV and the right to education; rights of prisoners and HIV/AIDS; and generally access to justice for people living with HIV/AIDS in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Sometimes the issues are not raised by communities but emanate from class discussions during the training that is led by experts in different fields. Such as , the issues of discrimination within the life insurance industry against people living with HIV/AIDS and of human trafficking in the build up to the 2010 FIFA World Cup and the vulnerability of neighbouring countries to South Africa. The former arose from discussions about the human rights obligations of big corporations, while the latter arose from the class on human trafficking and HIV that was led by experts from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

The issues raised by communities and those that emanate from the training are fully debated on a retreat during the training and using a selection criteria we select a few that then become the basis for future litigation. After the issues are selected we conduct in-depth research on them, form multi country case teams that develop the litigation strategy for each individual case. Thereafter we profile clients who will suit the strateg and then proactively attempt to identify them  after the students return to their institutions. One of the strategies we employ to proactively identify clients is to hold workshops on specific issues where people who have been victims of the human rights abuse that we seek to address come out with their stories and experiences. We, together with our partners, then offer them free legal services to challenge the violations in the courts.