WOMENS LINK WORLDWIDE INC

Women’s Link uses the power of the law to promote social change that advances the human rights of women and girls, especially those facing multiple forms of inequality. Our legal advocacy addresses the most widespread and systemic rights violations that the women and girls we represent face: gender-based violence; discrimination based on gender (and other intersecting causes, such as race and poverty); and violations of sexual and reproductive rights.

We’re working in Latin America, East Africa and Europe to attain more rights for more women by:
• improving laws and policies that advance women’s sexual reproductive rights
• protecting women’s and girls’ dignity and rights when they cross borders
• ensuring that the law protects and respects victims of human trafficking
• including the specific crimes that women and girls face in transitional justice processes

Women’s Link is an international legal organization working to produce social change through the courts. We believe that the law is a powerful tool for giving women and girls full access to their rights. We work at the national level in Latin America, East Africa and Europe, taking on opportunities that arise to use the law to bring about structural change that benefits women and girls and their communities.

We understand that it’s not sufficient for human rights to be debated inside the walls of the courts alone and that litigation can often serve as a platform for mobilization and activism. When litigation is coupled with communications strategies, we’re able to shine a spotlight on the experiences of women and girls, hold the courts accountable for issuing decisions in a way that promotes access to justice, and lay the groundwork for implementation of the court’s decision.

Women’s Link advances the human rights of women and girls through these interrelated strategies:
• Legal actions and strategic litigation, taking on legal advocacy to address systemic gender-based rights violations to eliminate barriers that the most marginalized women and girls face in accessing rights.

• Strategic communications designed in connection to legal strategies in order to demystify, destigmatize or reframe an issue and amplify the impact of legal actions by informing, educating, motivating and creating active support among leaders and decision-makers.

• Partnerships at all levels to strengthen our in-country capacity to implement resulting standards or decisions, creating sustained changes in the legal, political and social environments required to uphold women’s human rights.

Women’s Link is a team of experienced litigators and advocacy experts who work in national contexts in Latin America, East Africa and Europe. The organization has 501(c)(3) status in the United States, as well as non-profit status in Colombia and Spain. Founded in 2001, Women’s Link is governed by a Board of Directors who are leaders in human rights, public health, and law, and who provide governance and oversight of the organization. Our work is made possible by private foundations and a global community of individual donors. This support is essential because Women’s Link does not accept government funding, allowing the organization to be fully independent to speak out against laws and policies and bring cases against States that hurt women and girls.

To do our programmatic national-level work, we form hybrid teams of Women’s Link staff and local attorneys, communications experts and civil society that allow us to be responsive to emerging strategic opportunities and threats, capitalize on local knowledge and forge mutually-beneficial relationships. Our team identifies urgent threats or opportunities for innovation and impact, assemble an interdisciplinary team of staff and national-level experts and take action – designing legal, alliance and communications strategies targeted at eradicating the obstacles that prevent women and girls from accessing their human rights.

Over the past 20 years, Women’s Link has developed and carried out cutting edge legal strategies to advance women’s rights in Latin America, East Africa and Europe. Our innovative approach has produced significant impact by taking historically overlooked rights violations out of the shadows. This includes:

• Winning the case in Colombia that decriminalized abortion up until the 24th week of pregnancy, largely led by the Causa Justa movement.

• Winning the case in Colombia that ended the total ban on abortion, making it a right in the public health system under three broad circumstances. We then litigated the Constitutional Court case that made it mandatory to provide health services, including abortion, to victims of sexual violence.

• Ensuring that gender crimes are included in transitional justice processes and advancing justice for survivors of sexual violence and other gender-based crimes during the genocide in Guatemala, the dictatorship in Argentina, the civil war in Spain and the armed-conflict in Colombia.

• Winning the first-ever intersectional discrimination case at the European Court of Human Rights, bringing to light the way black African women experience gender discrimination in Europe.

• Obtaining a UN decision that protects women and their children from domestic violence, and subsequently a Spanish Supreme Court decision to implement that decision nationally and give reparations to our client, whose daughter was killed by her former partner.

Looking forward, Women’s Link will continue taking on cases to increase access to women’s sexual and reproductive rights and advance the rights of women and girls to be free from gender-based violence. This includes responding to global challenges and situations where crises and instability increase the number of rights violations that women experience, such as migration, humanitarian crises, armed-conflict, when right-wing forces gain strength and when women are trafficked.