Disability Rights and Legal Empowerment in Post War Sri Lanka

Join the Essex South Asian Research Network (ESARN) for an insightful online webinar with Miss Helena Marambio on Disability Rights and Legal Empowerment in Post War Sri Lanka.

Essex South Asian Research Network welcomes Miss Helena Marambio (Post Doctoral Research Associate) from Lincoln University and Chair Professor Lars Waldorf, University of Essex.

This webinar focuses on the potential of legal empowerment to help poor Tamil women with physical disabilities access to justice in rural areas in northern and eastern Sri Lanka. Legal empowerment is a form of rights-based development through which the poor become able to use the law as well as related bureaucratic and legal systems to advance their rights and needs, particularly livelihood schemes. To date, legal empowerment studies has not paid sufficient attention to people with intersecting vulnerabilities and related discrimination, particularly in post-war contexts.

Despite Sri Lanka’s ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, laws to protect people with disabilities are weakly enforced and policies to expand their opportunities are under-resourced. This talk explores whether and how legal empowerment programs help women gain legal awareness, self-esteem and self-confidence to get access to justice. It is based on five months of fieldwork in Sri Lanka in 2018, which involved semi-structured interviews with Tamil women with physical disabilities, disability rights activists, representatives of non-governmental organisations, governmental officers and members of the justice sector.

This webinar is part of an online open seminar series, hosted by the Essex South Asian Research Network (ESARN).

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