Specialized Justice in Plural Societies: NGOs and Violence Against Women Laws

• In Event: Human Rights and Pluralism

Abstract

Crime and security undermine democracy and human rights throughout Latin America, and are a cause and an outcome of political and social instability. Latin Americans consistently report that increasing security is a significant concern and a key priority for improving governance. With the goal of improving access to justice and human rights performance, international organizations began providing funding for local NGOs to support victims of crime. For instance, with this inflow of foreign aid, several NGOs in Mexico and Guatemala now provide victims of gender violence accompaniment through legal proceedings and sometimes even pro bono litigation. In plural societies such as Mexico and Guatemala, there is advocacy for and resistance to institutionalizing responses to violence against women with NGOs and within the state.

Pluralists advocate the construction of justice system institutions to accommodate the specialized interests of marginalized groups, such as women and marginalized subgroups of women (such as those who are poor and/or indigenous). Coordination between NGOs and the justice system attempt to fight impunity and improve the judicial responsiveness to legal claims, but at the same time this can constitute a problematic outsourcing of essential state functions. First, in part driven by limited resources, such funding tends to be specialized: usually focused on helping vulnerable and marginalized populations. Second, problems related to state capacity continue to plague the criminal justice system and pose obstacles to the rule of law. Thus, it is imperative that we understand if these efforts are working as intended to improve access to justice and human rights performance. Recent evidence suggests that NGO support for the justice system is necessary to attend to cases that would otherwise be left unresolved or abandoned by the public prosecutor. Have these NGOs had a significant impact in terms of access to justice and rule of law to protect women’s basic security rights?

In this paper, we aim to answer this question and analyze the improvements made for victims of crime through local NGOs in Guatemala and Mexico. Through a longitudinal comparison of cases of femicide (murders of women), we show the different paths such cases followed before and after the existence of women’s NGOs dedicated to victim services and litigation in Mexico and Guatemala. Although there is variation in how effective these NGOs are on the ground, they have in general enabled improvements in processing criminal cases. Through these case studies we further demonstrate that some improvements can be attributed both to having access to the legal accompaniment provided by NGOs and improvements in how the state processes femicides. Longitudinal comparisons also allow us to identify areas in which the state continues to fail victims, including excessive bureaucracy, a widespread lack of gender consciousness (further exacerbated by an entrenched culture of misogyny), inept justice system operators, and corruption. These findings make evident that the long-term success of any efforts from abroad or below to fight impunity and improve democratic governance are ultimately dependent on the limitations of piecing together justice in weak states with plural societies.

Authors

• Shannon Drysdale Walsh, University of Minnesota Duluth

• Veronica Michel-Luviano, John Jay College-CUNY