Rights. Justice. Action for all women and girls.
On 10 March, the Charles Telfair Centre moderated the opening panel of a Multi-Stakeholder Workshop on Women's Rights in Vision 2050, organised by the UN in Mauritius & Seychelles in partnership with the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family Welfare, to mark International Women's Day 2026.
The panel "Lived Realities, Rights and Justice," brought together five practitioners doing essential work at the frontline of the gap between law and lived experience.
Some key takeaways:
- Implementation Gap: Mauritius has a solid legislative framework for gender equality, but across poverty, detention, child protection, and gender-based violence, our panellists described the challenges faced by victim to enforce their rights.
- Absence of victim-centred approaches. From the moment of reporting through to court proceedings and aftercare, the system remains largely procedural. For many women and children, engaging with institutions meant to protect them becomes a source of re-traumatisation rather than support.
- Bias and stigma. Whether facing intergenerational poverty, returning from detention, disclosing abuse, or seeking legal aid as a survivor of violence, women and girls encounter social attitudes and institutional responses that discourage them from claiming their rights. These barriers do not affect all women equally. The panel made visible the intersecting dimensions of exclusion that shape access to justice: poverty, age, disability, legal status, and the compounding effects of being marginalised on more than one axis at once.
Proposed solutions for vision 2050: reform judicial institutions towards a victim-centred approach; invest in the training of officers across judicial and social services, including judges and magistrates, so they can serve women and children with effectiveness and empathy; and support the development of infrastructure, institutions, and processes that protect women and girls at every stage of their encounter with the justice system.
