Lawyers Collective LC is batting for the rights of women, sexual minorities

Should private companies be allowed to set exorbitant and monopolistic prices on life-saving medicines?

Can the law help restore the equality rights of women, both in the workplace and at home?

How can one prevent the discrimination faced by people living with HIV in hospitals, homes and the workplace?

At a time when the Supreme Court is being lauded as the ultimate bastion of the liberals and court proceedings are making daily headlines, a small, fiercely independent collective of lawyers has been working since 1981 to use the law to devise changes in public policy. Delhi-based Lawyers Collective LC has, over the years, fought for the rights of women, sexual minorities, HIV and cancer patients, and more, to secure several landmark judgments that have significantly sharpened focus on their problems, even as they have changed government and employer policies.

Here’s a sampler: In 2013, based on an intellectual property case LC fled on behalf of Cancer Patients Aid Association, pharma major Novartis’s patent for the life-saving leukemia drug Gleevec was rejected. At that time, Novartis was selling Gleevec in India at $2,666 per patient per month, while generic versions of the drug were priced between $177 and $266 per patient per month. LC’s work on women’s rights has also had a far-reaching impact. In 2001, it initiated the move to decriminalise homosexuality by filing the first writ petition in Delhi High Court, challenging the constitutionality of the section on behalf of Naz Foundation (India) Trust. Its campaign for a civil law on domestic violence began in the early 1990s and led to the creation of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005. It continues to advocate more effective implementation of the law and for making it more accessible to women.

“We envisaged Lawyers Collective as having a two-fold purpose,” says Indira Jaising, who co-founded it with husband and fellow advocate Anand Grover. “First, to use the law to access basic human rights of the country’s minorities, and second, to make it more accessible to common people.” The idea came to her when she saw free legal aid centres in the UK, where citizens could simply walk in to access legal advice and lawyers. In India, however, she felt the need to blend activism with the law. “Minorities in India, be they the LGBTQ community or the poor, or even women, need not only legal access, but also a better framework of laws and procedures to protect their fundamental rights,” she says. Which is why much of LC’s present work is about advocacy for better laws. For example, it is working on India’s first law against discrimination based on HIV status. Recently, it has, in collaboration with a group of female genital mutilation survivors, published a legal report, “Female Genital Mutilation: A Guide to Eliminating the Practice of FGM in India”.

In a bid to make the law not only more accessible but also easier to understand for laypeople, LC launched an online publication, The Leaflet, this July. “The idea is to demystify legal opinion and educate the lay reader,” says Jaising. This project, like all others of LC, is being cross-subsidised by Jaising and Grover’s earnings as advocates. “We’ve done so since the government banned foreign funds by cancelling our FCRA licence in 2016,” she says. “This was a turning point for us as we realised how vindictive the government could become just because we fought cases against it, including those on behalf of terrorist Yakub Memon, IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt and Greenpeace member Priya Pillai.”

Jaising would like to see LC developing a legal aid centre for women facing sexual harassment and violence.

“So many women come to me with the stories of harassment and abuse. If we had a well-staffed legal aid centre, we could help them get justice,” she says. 

This would require, however, huge outlays of capital. But Jaising isn’t worried. “We’re enjoying the independence that comes from being self-funded, although we’ve challenged the FCRA ban to clear our name,” she says. “Maybe corporate and individual donors genuinely interested in improving the access to law for the common man will come forward.”

Meanwhile, Grover, Jaising and their cohorts at LC are going to continue doing what they do best — use the grammar of law to positively change the vocabulary of public policy.
For more, visit www.lawyerscollective.org and theleaflet.in or follow them on Facebook and Twitter