At Women’s Link, we have been using the law creatively to achieve justice for women and girls for more than 20 years. We are convinced that it is a valuable tool to bring them closer to justice, to a life free of violence and discrimination, and to full autonomy over their bodies and decisions.

How do we do it? Our first step is always to thoroughly study the contexts in which we want to work. We then identify what legal precedents, models and tools are available and how we might use them with a gender perspective to advance women’s rights.

An example of this way of working is a “acción popular” that we filed in September 2020 in Colombia. This legal mechanism enables the protection of collective rights and interests when they have been violated or there is a risk that they will be violated.

Our team had been researching for quite some time the legal avenues that we could use to eliminate barriers to access to sexual and reproductive rights in the regions of Colombia. In studying the “acción popular”, we saw that this mechanism allowed us to protect the sexual and reproductive rights of a broad group of women and to promote their interpretation as collective rights. This was our opportunity to innovate and use the law in a creative way, since it is uncommon for this type of suit to be used to demand the protection of sexual and reproductive rights.

The objective of our “acción popular” was to make visible and overcome the barriers that many women face in accessing sexual and reproductive health services in Norte de Santander, one of Colombia’s departments that borders Venezuela. In this department, there are not enough service providers, supplies, or trained medical personnel to guarantee voluntary termination of pregnancy, and these issues intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, we know that many migrant women suffer discrimination in health centers because of their nationality and migratory status, including pregnant women who require immediate attention. Thus, we focused on the collective right of women to have effective and timely access to sexual and reproductive health services, especially abortion and maternal and child health care for migrant women from Venezuela.

The strategy yielded excellent results: in November 2021, a court in Cúcuta, the capital of Norte de Santander, ordered different health authorities to take immediate measures to protect the sexual and reproductive health of women in the department of Norte de Santander, including access to voluntary termination of pregnancy.

Read the full article about using the law to protect women’s and girls’ rights by Valeria Pedraza at Global Washington.