Pathways of Legal Advocacy for Change: Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association

Abstract

Changing the legal environment can have transformative impacts on the lives of the most vulnerable. However, little is known about how legal advocacy can effectively achieve this within contexts where governments are not receptive to advocacy of this nature. This article outlines the activities of the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (EWLA) as it played a focal role in changing the Family Law, making important progress to removing aspects of the law that discriminated against women. We outline the ‘pathway’ of change taken by the organization, which moved from service provision to building an evidence-based, formal and informal advocacy, and finally utilizing critical junctures to encourage change to the law. This article also highlights the important role of enabling environments, as after several successful efforts of legal advocacy, the government closed down the operational space for legal advocacy, effectively stifling continued, or any new forms of, legal advocacy. This article provides insight on successful approaches to legal advocacy in challenging governance contexts as well as the limitations and opportunities that external actors can have.

Keywords:

• Ethiopia
• advocacy
• participation
• change
• development
• law
• policy

Notes on contributors

Logan Cochrane is a Banting Fellow at Carleton University (Global and International Studies) and Adjunct Professor at Hawassa University (Institute for Policy and Development Research).

Betel Bekele Birhanu is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Political Science, University of Zurich, and a former lecturer at Addis Ababa and Adama Universities, Ethiopia. Her research interest includes sub-Saharan Africa, human rights, international development, civic space, social movements, gender and political violence.

Notes

1 As of 2015, the Afar and Somali regional states have maintained the 1960 Family Law while customary and Shariah Law are utilized in tandem (Mulugeta, 2015).

2 The three were Amhara, Oromia and Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ regional states (Burgess, 2013).

3 Previously the rules and rights relating to minor and guardianship were located within the Civil Code (Tilahun, 2002).

4 It was alleged that in opposition to the Registration and Regulation of Charities and Societies / CSO Law, the EWLA, and specifically its Executive Director, provided evidence to the U.S. State Department, which was suggested to have influenced the U.S. State Department’s Human Rights Report on Ethiopia (Burgess, 2013).