The speeches soon to be delivered by world leaders in the General Assembly Hall will likely offer an important glimpse into how topics of all kinds will be viewed at the highest levels of decision-making. Not least among these is the vital question of access to justice for women and girls, which will be the primary theme under consideration at the 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70). As this topic is increasingly discussed in the coming months, it is vital that those of us who engage in the gender equality space continuously reflect on what we mean when we call for greater access to justice.

Many deliberations on justice center on mechanisms that allow for greater numbers of women and girls to access equitable legal systems, approaches to repealing discriminatory laws, and so on. Along with this focus on access, there should also be space dedicated to the pursuit of a more expansive understanding of justice as a guiding principle in our daily lives and work. Our understanding of the kind of justice we seek reinforces the norms that govern spaces in which we operate in public and private spheres. 

Justice must be accessible through the courts, but it also finds expression in many other ways. There can be justice in how an employer treats employees, in the way populations are portrayed in the media, and in the distribution of resources. What might it look like to approach justice as a quality or capacity inherent and continually evolving in each individual, community, and institution? 

This conception of justice allows for new and innovative applications. For example, justice could be viewed as the capacity to recognize the nobility of each human being. It could be the capacity to push aside age-old prejudices, to inoculate oneself from dangerous stereotypes, and to pull away the blinds of discriminatory biases. Such an application of justice to our daily lives can help us to overcome divisive norms and attitudes (based on economic status, geography, nationality, etc.) that inhibit a more unified gender equality movement. Daily attention to building these capacities can strengthen the communal bonds we need in the movement. It can even give us the courage to own and act on the personal and collective obligations and responsibilities that accessing justice necessitates.  

This reconceptualization of justice beyond the mechanics of legal and judicial systems has implications for what it means to be a compassionate, kind, and empathetic human being. It widens the horizon of the just relationships we can have. It can allow us to discard the insidious false knowledge that lurks behind those entrenched prejudices that often hold people back from expressing their full humanity. 

Reflecting deeply on how we understand justice can help us build a common framework upon which we act. This applies as much to world leaders taking the floor to speak during the United Nations General Assembly High-Level Week as it does to those who are preparing for the multitude of activities leading up to CSW70. Without this reflection, we are frenetically moving from one initiative to another, uncoordinated and incoherent. 

A fundamental rethinking of how we understand justice is critical to our personal and collective work, so that we are not simply retrofitting outdated modes of thinking and doing. The aim is not to increase the number of women and girls who can access fundamentally flawed institutions that are ultimately incapable of fully serving them. We need parallel lines of action. As much as we need work on advancing, strengthening, and increasing the validity and efficacy of judicial mechanisms, we also need large numbers engaged in an individual and collective learning process about the numerous ways that justice finds expression in society and how it can be strengthened. Much of this work takes shape in the hearts and minds of people, in addition to the structures of our institutions.

Liliane Nkunzimana is a Representative of the Bahá’í International Community to the United Nations