Selective Justice: Why Legal Systems Don’t Protect Women in Our Region?

In previous pieces of this series, we explored how economic policies, financing choices, and ongoing wars shape women’s lives—and how these systems reproduce inequality rather than dismantle it. In this piece, we move one step further to ask a more radical question: Is justice merely a matter of laws and courts, or is it produced—and denied—far beyond them?
“Access to justice” sits at the center of international discourse on women’s rights. It is often framed in legal terms: better laws, more efficient courts, and judicial mechanisms capable of accountability.
But in our region, this framing is not only insufficient—it is often misleading.
Laws are not applied equally, and judicial justice is constantly constrained by political and social power structures. The issue is not simply the absence of legal texts, but who has the power to activate them—and who is excluded from accessing them in the first place.
Women may hold rights on paper, yet face real barriers when trying to claim them: bureaucratic procedures, high litigation costs, limited legal awareness, and deep social pressures that push them toward silence rather than confrontation. In many cases, the laws themselves are shaped by unequal gender norms, limiting their ability to deliver real justice.
Even in high-profile cases, justice often remains partial.
In Morocco, the 2021 Tangier factory tragedy—where women workers died in an informal industrial unit during floods—exposed the limits of legal protection. Despite investigations, the factory owner received only a one-and-a-half-year sentence—an outcome that fails to reflect the scale and structural nature of the violence.
In Egypt, in 2025, an infant died after her mother—a textile factory worker in Alexandria—was denied leave to care for her despite her deteriorating health, and prevented from leaving work in time. The case sparked outrage and labor strikes, yet the official response remained limited to administrative measures and compensation, with no clear judicial accountability. Women’s lives—and their children’s—are thus reduced to costs that can be managed, rather than rights that must be protected.
In the Gulf, this pattern becomes even more severe. In 2024, Human Rights Watch documented the case of a Kenyan domestic worker in Saudi Arabia who was forced to work up to 16 hours a day without rest and repeatedly denied medical care despite severe pain. This is not an isolated case, but part of a broader system where the kafala system restricts workers’ mobility and makes their access to healthcare—and sometimes survival—entirely dependent on employers, in the absence of effective legal remedies.
In a world of deepening inequality, justice cannot be confined to legal frameworks.
At its core, injustice is rooted in systems of power that determine who controls resources, who participates in decision-making, and who is excluded.
In the Global South, women face structural barriers that courts alone cannot resolve. When civic space shrinks, feminist movements are marginalized, and economic decisions are made far away from the affected communities, legal justice loses its transformative potential. Worse still, many policies that reproduce inequality are not even recognized as violations.
For example: Public budget decisions, Investment priorities, and Natural resource governance. These shape millions of women’s lives, yet remain outside judicial accountability.
From this perspective, real justice cannot be reduced to legal systems—it must be understood through power, participation, and redistribution.
Ultimately, the struggle for justice is not only a legal battle—it is a political and collective act of resistance.
It is about expanding democratic space, reclaiming community agency, and reimagining the economic and political systems that govern our lives.
Justice begins when people have real power over the conditions that shape their lives