Women lawyers force big rights gains in Uganda
This spring, a small group of lawyers helped overturn laws that gave men more rights than women.
from the June 14, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
Decades of work bear fruit
FIDA-U has been responsible for the legal victories of hundreds of everyday Ugandan women since 1974.
But the group's recent legal success was born of years of hard work and strategic organizing. "We had all these brilliant ideas; we thought we could move mountains," says Regina Lule Mutyaba, who joined FIDA-U over 15 years ago to work on a project that helped women write wills during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. FIDA-U was then becoming well known for its advocacy work in Uganda, attracting women from all over the country and, ultimately, the interest of the US-based Georgetown University Law Center.
In 1997, Georgetown helped the lawyers form a coalition, Law and Advocacy for Women in Uganda (LAWU), that would be the apparatus for launching landmark challenges to national marriage and divorce laws.
"Our key strategy was that we had commitment, international support in the form of money and research, and a diverse team of lawyers," says Mutyaba. "Nobody was doing this kind of work: strategic litigation to eliminate laws biased against women."
Though Uganda's 1995 constitution has a clause that upholds legal equality for both sexes, previous efforts to amend archaic marriage, divorce, and property laws by the ministry for gender were lackluster and failed. And by virtue of being a non-profit organization, LAWU did not have enough resources to compete with the abundance of the attorney general's resources.
"But we did our preparation," Mutyaba says. For over a year, the lawyers met weekly to pore over research and to perfect their pleadings. A prominent male lawyer was recruited to argue against legislation that was most harmful to women, in order to soften the team's approach.
Putting the government 'on its toes'
Good organization and a long history of activism have made FIDA-U "powerful" and distinguishes it from many burgeoning women's movements in sub-Saharan Africa, says Michael Wangusa, who works on gender issues for the British charity Oxfam. FIDA-U has established itself as an influential lobbying force, he says.
By forcing the courts to uphold the Constitution through eliminating laws biased against women, it has "put the government on its toes," says Carol Bunga Idembe, an advocacy analyst at the women's rights group Uganda Women's Network.
At the end of last month, LAWU petitioned a Ugandan court demanding that female genital mutilation, practiced by several communities in the eastern region of the country, be declared illegal. Though at least 16 African countries have banned the practice, the effort marks the first time a campaign against the practice has been launched in Uganda.
The overturning of the adultery law caused a public uproar over concerns that it would lead to increased promiscuity, and the female genital mutilation campaign has already stirred worries about cultural encroachment. But Mutyaba and her colleagues say that they are not worried.
As Mutyaba states: "There will be an outcry, but we are expecting it."
RSS feed
