Access to Justice in Contexts of Precarious State Institutions

This presentation will be based in my work on Access to Justice in Latin America, where there are contesting ideas of what is "fair" and what "justice institutions" are better to fit the requirements to build a Democratic Rule of Law. Among several challenges to Justice are structural inequalities, social exclusion, and discrimination along ethnic, racial, and gender lines. All of them contribute to the erosion or violations of basic human rights, committed both by state institutions and by other non-state powerful actors, like informal powers, criminal networks or other organizations.____ Although political liberties associated with democracy have been secured in many countries (i.e., the rights to suffrage, association, and freedom of speech) several indicators of the Rule of Law are still lacking. Also the systematic violation of human rights still poses a major challenge to democracy across the region. As a reaction several forms and resistance actions have been introduce by civil society organizations making the region a territory of dispute between progressive and other traditional conservative actors.