Public Legal Education

Developing a community of practice

Legal empowerment

What is legal empowerment?

“Legal empowerment is about strengthening the capacity of all people to exercise their rights, either as individuals or as members of a community. It’s about grassroots justice—about ensuring that law is not confined to books or courtrooms, but rather is available and meaningful to ordinary people.”
“Rights mean little if those entitled to them are not aware they exist. Due process is of doubtful value when you are illiterate, or unable to understand the proceedings. Courts are next to worthless for those who cannot afford the bus fare to reach them. Nor should justice be about courts alone. For all these reasons, legal empowerment is crucial. Part of IDLO’s bottom-up (or demand side) approach, it involves equipping people with the knowledge, confidence and skills to realize their rights. Even as we work to improve the functioning of justice systems, we strengthen citizens’ capacity to press for justice from below.”
According to the UN Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor, “the legal empowerment framework has four pillars: access to justice and the rule of law, property rights, labour rights and business rights.
    • Access to justice and the rule of law: The poor may be unable to access the justice system due to a lack of formal identity or of knowledge about the system, illiteracy, or lack of legal services available to them. Laws that affect the poor are often unclear, contradictory, outdated or discriminatory in their impact. Access to formally documented legal identity and the existence of functioning mechanisms for implementing rights are key to providing access to justice for the poor.
    • Property rights: Secure and accessible property rights provide a sense of identity, dignity, and belonging. They create reliable ties of rights and obligations within a community and a system of mutual recognition of rights and responsibilities beyond it. Functional property rights are associated with stable growth and social contracts.
    • Labour rights: A well-designed system of labour rights should provide both protection and opportunity. Recognition and enforcement of the rights of individual workers and their organisations is critical for breaking the cycle of poverty.
    • Business rights: When laws regulating small businesses are unfairly drafted, implemented, or enforced, or simply too weak and inefficient, they leave the poor little option but to trade in the informal economy. Ensuring rights to vend, to have a workspace and related infrastructure and services would facilitate the success of small and medium enterprises and be an invaluable step towards poverty reduction.
Golub identifies four attributes of legal empowerment:

“(1) attorneys support the poor as partners, instead of dominating them as proprietors of expertise;

(2) the disadvantaged play a role in setting priorities, rather than government officials and donor personnel dictating the agenda;

(3) addressing these priorities frequently involves nonjudicial strategies that transcend narrow notions of legal systems, justice sectors, and institution building;

(4) even more broadly, the use of law is often just part of integrated strategies that include other development activities.”

Resources of Interest

Documents of Interest

Golub. Beyond Rule of Law Orthodoxy

UN Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor, 2008, ‘The Four Pillars of Legal Empowerment’, in Making the Law Work for Everyone Volume I, Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor and United Nations Development Programme, New York, pp. 25-42

UN Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor, Making the Law Work for Everyone,

Organizations of interest

The Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, an independent international organization, hosted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and established in 2005 as the “first global initiative to focus on the link between exclusion, poverty, and the law.”