Shariafication by stealth in the UK PRAGNA PATEL 17 October 2014 Access to justice is being denied in the UK in the shadow of neoliberalism and religious fundamentalism. Pragna Patel argues that minority women are being denied the right to participate in the wider political community as citizens rather than subjects. In the last five years or so in the UK, SBS has increasingly been preoccupied with one key question above all else: how to access justice on behalf of the most vulnerable. Of course, access to justice has always been a central concern, given that we have long recognised the law as a key site of feminist resistance. We have used the law in a variety of ways to ensure that the most marginalised and vulnerable can exercise their right to equality, justice and fairness in civil and criminal proceedings. Examples include our casework and campaigns on Kiranjit Aluwalia and the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007. This has involved laying bare in the law class, race and gender norms that reproduce inequality and legitimate exclusionary and discriminatory outcomes for minority women. The struggle to hold the law to account in this sense remains unfinished business, even though together with others, we have made some significant gains along the way. However, the struggle to access justice has now reached crisis point. The ever widening shadow of neo-liberalism and the continuing rise of fundamentalist religious identity politics have left us struggling on two interlinked fronts. First, we are compelled to challenge the state for removing legal aid from a huge range of civil and criminal matters which impact not only on individual rights but also on our demands for institutional accountability in the face of abuses of power that seem to be growing rather than diminishing. The government’s ‘reforms’ on legal aid are strongly located in a fiscal context that reiterate some of the key overarching aims of the present government: localism, alternative dispute resolution strategies, deficit reduction and deregulation. Taken together these measures are destroying one of the great pillars of the welfare state. They have forced SBS into leading or supporting legal and political challenges against various legal aid cuts. https://opendemocracy.net/5050/pragna-patel/shariafication-by-stealth-in-uk
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 05:59:19 +0000
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