The Potential of Legal Empowerment for Disadvantaged Groups – A Case Study of Tamil Women with Physical Disabilities in Post-War Sri Lanka

This socio-legal thesis examines the potential of legal empowerment to promote access to justice for poor, disadvantaged people. It is argued that the current disconnect of the original socio-psycho-legal composition of the concept has led to one-sided analyses on the law and its use by the disadvantaged, which ignores the target individual and his/her psychological development as well as the contextual environment in which legal empowerment programmes take place. In this light, it is imperative to reconsider legal empowerment as an inclusive concept that is reflected in an inclusive framework which pays equal attention to both context-specific education on the law and other relevant matters, as well as the enhancement of self-esteem, self-confidence and self-belief that considers context-related barriers and limits. Without such a holistic perspective, legal empowerment may fall short in supporting the disadvantaged individual to make use of the law and bureaucratic procedures when problems occur, particularly in complex religio-cultural, legal and political settings. To validate this thesis, this work applies a mixed-methods case study on Tamil women with physical disabilities from rural areas of the north and east of Sri Lanka who experience intersectional discrimination on the grounds of gender, disability, poverty, rurality and ethnicity.