Ricochet Effect on Courts: Analysing the Impact of Online Transition on the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

Regional human rights courts like the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), and the African Court of Human and People's Rights (ACtHPR) have become popular sites of mobilization for victims and activists who seek justice when justice fails at home. Besides being platforms for individual remedy, human rights courts increasingly shape social norms and state policy within countries, making them attractive avenues for rights advocates to develop new norms or to push domestic authorities to reform legislation. The judges of these courts can decide, for example, whether same-sex couples have a right to be married, if prisoners have the right to vote or receive HIV/AIDS treatment, or when a state can deport illegal immigrants to a country where they will likely be tortured. As these courts pass their judgments, they often find themselves in conflict with states that are violating human rights of marginalized groups on a large scale and are unwilling to implement international rulings. Although international human rights courts have become increasingly popular venues among victims and activists who seek justice when justice fails at home, we are only beginning to understand how activists play roles in shaping the development of regional human rights courts' case law—the body of judgments that shapes how judges will make their decisions in the future. We now have plenty of international relations and international legal research on the interactions between states and international courts: how judges in these courts wrestle between deferring to the interests of member state governments whose actions are on trial and sticking closely to the conventions' fundamental yet evolving principles (Alter et al., 2019; Helfer & Voeten, 2014). As some states begin to resist international courts' authority, scholars have begun to examine the dynamics of this backlash (Hillebrecht, 2022; Madsen et al., 2018; Sandholtz et al., 2018). Recent studies have also demonstrated that human rights advocates—whether NGOs or individual lawyers—have a significant impact on shaping the jurisprudence of international courts and the impact judgments have in concrete locations (Kahraman, 2018; Sundstrom, 2014; van der Vet, 2012; Kurban, 2020; Conant, 2018; Harms, 2021; Cichowski, 2016; Hodson, 2011; Haddad, 2018). Meanwhile, these advocates themselves have been subject to repression and stigmatization by governments as part of the backlash phenomenon. Without an adequate understanding of the factors shaping activists' engagement with international courts, we risk undervaluing their strategic impact on the expansion of case law, the human rights protection of marginalized groups who cannot find remedies at home, and the domestic implementation of these judgments in an age of state backlash. In this section, we summarize the three papers contained in this symposium and their original contributions to these themes. Over the last decade, dozens of countries have erected legal barriers or started vilifying campaigns to stymie the work of NGOs (Buyse, 2018; Chaudhry, 2022). One tactic in this toolkit is the enactment of burdensome regulation on NGOs that receive funds from foreign donors as they allegedly promote foreign agendas (Christensen & Weinstein, 2013; Dupuy et al., 2021). States that frequently abuse human rights are especially prone to target NGOs that engage in strategic litigation (Hillebrecht, 2019). Most NGOs depend on foreign funding, and NGOs that litigate international cases fall disproportionately in this category, but do funders affect the selection of cases? In “Foreign Agents or Agents of Justice? Private Foundations, NGO Backlash, and International Human Rights Litigation,” Heidi Haddad and Lisa Sundstrom examine the extent to which Western donors, particularly private foundations, have encouraged NGOs in Europe to litigate at the ECtHR as a human rights advocacy strategy. They examine overall patterns of donor funding and NGO litigation records, and look in more detail at the case of Russian NGOs' foreign funding and litigation records. The analysis is extremely timely, as the Russian government's criminalization of independent civil society actors, especially in the human rights field, and their accusation that foreign funding turns NGOs into “foreign agents” have been crucial elements of the Russian regime's autocratization. This claim has also provided fuel for Russia's disenchantment with the ECtHR in recent years, contributing to the assessment of many observers that Russia's full-scale attack on Ukraine was the last straw in an inevitable collision course leading to its exit from the Council of Europe. Haddad and Sundstrom debunk the idea that foreign donors are pushing NGOs toward strategies of human rights litigation. Instead, they argue, there is more evidence that NGOs themselves promoted the mechanism of international litigation as a strategy that donors later adopted. This article is a poignant reminder of the advocacy tools that Russian human rights activists and citizens have lost as a result of their government's departure from the Council of Europe, including ECtHR jurisdiction. Yet it also provides insight into the likely roles of foreign donors in other country cases where NGOs are using international court litigation as a human rights advocacy strategy, which is often a target of the ire of national governments, as explored in the next article in the symposium. When states attack human rights NGOs within their borders and/or international human rights courts themselves, how does this affect the willingness of those NGOs to take cases to international courts, and the ways in which they do so? De Silva and Plagis ask this question in their article about state backlash against NGOs in the case of Tanzania and the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights. A fascinating empirical question they pose is: does state backlash against NGOs increase NGO litigation at international courts (to contest state repression at those courts and use international mechanisms when domestic ones are not available), roughly in line with Keck and Sikkink's famous “boomerang pattern” (Keck & Sikkink, 1998), or decrease it due to heightened fear and restricted NGO capabilities that state repression creates? Employing a process-tracing analysis of NGOs' involvement in three cases before the African Court at different stages of the Tanzanian government's backlash against the Court, De Silva and Plagis find that “two-level backlash” by states can result in both phenomena, either promoting or deterring NGO legal mobilization at international human rights courts, depending on certain conditions. The three selected cases concerning the death penalty, the rights of persons with albinism, and the rights of pregnant schoolgirls and mothers, which took place at different time periods, demonstrate a number of patterns of state backlash interacting with NGO strategies. The authors find that domestic-level state backlash deterred domestic NGOs from partnering with international NGOs in litigation, but that such backlash, when it repressed domestic political and legal mobilization opportunities, actually encouraged both Tanzanian and international NGOs to turn to the African Court more frequently to seek remedies. International-level backlash in turn only deterred NGOs from international litigation when such backlash consisted of state efforts to restrict NGOs' ability to engage in litigation, and not when the international backlash was in the form of routine noncompliance with African Court rulings. Importantly, the authors find that NGO responses to state backlash were significantly shaped by their degree of legal consciousness and expertise with the rules, proceedings, and workings of the African Court. Those NGOs with less knowledge and experience were more likely to back away from engaging with the Court under the pressure of state backlash. De Silva and Plagis conclude that “NGOs' persistent human rights advocacy in the face of state backlash is a double-edged sword,” in the sense that they may not be deterred by state backlash initially, but there is a danger that their continued determination to engage in international litigation could prompt governments to engage in even more severe forms of backlash, with critical impacts on international courts and already vulnerable human rights defenders. Rights advocates have a growing menu of institutions and courts available to them. How do activists choose at which institution to lodge their cases in a world where legal remedies have diversified, or as some have argued, fragmented (Koskenniemi & Leino, 2002)? In “What Makes an International Institution Work for Labor Activists? Shaping International Law through Strategic Litigation,” Filiz Kahraman goes beyond the tendency of legal mobilization studies to only examine how activists interact with a single court or institution. Instead, Kahraman opens up how rights advocates imagine which institution is most receptive to their claims. Drawing on a comparative interview study of British and Turkish trade union activists and their legal mobilization campaigns at international courts and quasi-judicial institutions like the International Labor Organization (ILO), Kahraman examines how activists first probe and then strategically identify which court or international institution is most susceptible to their primary goals of influencing structural reforms and setting new norms. Through this probing process—or dynamic signaling game between courts and litigants—activists push a court's jurisprudence and case law into new issue areas. For instance, at the ECtHR, Turkish trade unionists challenged domestic courts' ruling that public sector workers did not have the right to establish unions, even though the ECtHR had no established case law on labor rights in 1990s. They won the case, with the ECtHR finding that Turkey violated the right of public sector workers to unionize. These cases not only had an impact within Turkey, but over the next decades, similar cases brought by British unionists would spin off the early precedent set by the Turkish legal mobilization efforts. Kahraman argues that they ultimately pushed the ECtHR to recognize the basic trade union rights as fundamental human rights. Kahraman sheds light on the often hidden strategies behind international litigation. Activists litigate not just for the immediate impact on the current case they work on, but how they envision that all the cases they work on may shape norms and domestic structural reforms further in the future. Whether an institution is perceptive of claims lies in the eye of the beholder. Kahraman finds that besides targeting institutions with high compliance rates, they also take cases to institutions with low rates of compliance, especially “if these institutions have extensive judicial authority to create new international norms.” So, it is not the de jure protection set by an international courts, but rather how activists perceive the juridical responsiveness and judicial authority of courts—or, how judges adopt either an activist approach or restraint in response to incoming cases and how willing states are to implement cases of a court, respectively—that determines why activists select certain courts or quasi-judicial institutions (like the ILO). Kahraman gives us new tools to interpret how activists perceive authority and receptiveness and respond to opportunities. Rather than static external legal remedies, courts and quasi-judicial institutions are opportunity structures that are malleable to the strategic vision of the activist or litigant. The articles in this symposium together reveal a number of key overlapping insights. At the broadest level, they demonstrate that activists' behaviors and strategies influence international courts' jurisprudence, politics within states, and the human rights outcomes of everyday citizens—and these influences have often been hidden in our existing canon of research on international courts. In addition, all of these articles show that, while activists may face challenges in their efforts, often including significant backlash from their home state governments, they also continue to retain significant agency through their creative efforts to develop legal strategies and circumvent state repression. Activists perennially innovate: sparking the ideas that inspire donors who fund them; calculating how to continue their litigation work when government actors threaten them; and taking risks in litigation to push courts to expand how they define human rights. However, along with these uplifting conclusions, there are worrying patterns that demand future research. States are increasingly pushing back against the powers of international courts to bind them to costly measures, and as this symposium has shown, national governments often point to activists as contributors to this “problem” of invasive international human rights standards. A growing body of research has tracked how human rights defenders of all kinds globally are under threat from actors like governments and corporations who disagree with their contentious actions. We need more studies that gather comprehensive data and systematically track these threats, specifically with regard to activists who engage in international human rights litigation. We suspect that such activists are likely disproportionately targeted due to the international visibility of their complaints. We also desperately need research into possible innovative responses to these threats to activists—responses from activists, funders, governments of countries that support human rights, and international courts themselves. Freek van der Vet is a University Researcher at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki and the principal investigator of the Toxic Crimes Project. Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom is Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. She is the director of the ActinCourts network at UBC and conducts research on legal mobilization by Russian activists.

The Nuremberg tribunal was the expression and the beginning of states' recognition of their duty to prosecute genocide and other gross human rights violations. It was a first step towards fulfillin...

This article is devoted to the problems of execution of a State’s obligations under an international treaty after entry into force of that State’s denunciation of the treaty. The author considers the limits of an international court’s jurisdiction ratione temporis as well as possible options for the execution of international court judgments after the denunciation decision’s entry into force. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights proposed classifying by duration all the violations described in complaints filed against a former party to an international treaty. This approach was accepted by the European Court of Human Rights and used in its recent decision against the Russian Federation. Considering the problem of enforcement of the rulings of regional human rights courts, the author comes to the conclusion that the European system for protection of human rights and freedoms does not offer specific mechanisms for resolving the problem of boycott and non-enforcement of courts’ judgments by a respondent State. At the same time, a mechanism of collective guarantees is used by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as the main instrument for enforcement as to former States Parties. The article examines the possibilities of overcoming the crisis in the dialogue between national and international courts by using this mechanism of collective guarantees. The author considers the Advisory Opinion of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights OC-26/20 on the human rights obligations of a State that has denounced the American Convention on Human Rights. This Advisory Opinion gives participants in the Convention the power to investigate the context and the formal conditions under which the denunciation decision was made at the national level as well as whether this decision followed constitutional procedures which received mixed assessments in the opinions of judges of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, among others. The author also discusses options for preventing denunciation at an early stage, through procedures provided for by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

This article reviews the most important cases decided by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights between 2021 and 2023. The Court has introduced important changes in the understanding of legal concepts of Inter-American law that will significantly impact the region. The authors of the article provide an overview of the jurisprudence of the In-ter-American Court of Human Rights on the following range of issues: 1) transitional justice; 2) the right to the protec-tion of human rights and the right to informational self-determination; 3) the right to a healthy environment; 4) the right to freedom of expression; 5) sexual and reproductive rights; and 6) the obligations of businesses to respect hu-man rights irrespective of one’s sexual orientation. It is noted that the right to the protection of human rights and the right to informational self-determination have been recognized by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for the first time. The Court also resolved the issue of the status of human rights defenders by including in this category not only lawyers, but also paralegals, technical and administrative staff, members of the press and political scientists. In ad-dition, the Court has recognized the responsibility of the State for violations of the human right to a healthy environ-ment, as well as specified the State’s obligations in relation to mining activities that may have an impact on the envi-ronment. In decisions on cases involving violations of the right to freedom of expression, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has clarified the special nature of the protection to be guaranteed to journalists, in particular women journalists, and has also pointed out the special obligations of States to protect the rights of indigenous peoples in rela-tion to their access to radio broadcasting. In the authors’ view, these and other landmark decisions presented in this review demonstrate that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights is committed to the progressive development of inter-American law. The categories of issues addressed by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights presented in this article indicate directions for the evolution of the system of regional human rights protection in the Americas.

Existing literature on the Inter-American Human Rights System generally portrays an evolving transnational community of courts, with domestic apex courts and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights engaged in a shared and mutually reinforcing enterprise to vindicate rights and curb the arbitrary exercise of state power. This chapter addresses an underexplored relationship which cuts against this harmonious picture—namely, the rather frosty stance of the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil towards the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. It is argued that this relationship is not only interesting in itself, but highlights the need for further exploration of a number of questions which go to the heart of our understanding of the Inter-American Human Rights System, including the precise requirements of ‘conventionality control’, and the extent to which the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ jurisprudential approach can accommodate opposing domestic positions. These are questions that have global resonance—in Europe, Africa and in world regions contemplating the establishment of regional human rights courts.

The Right of a Healthy Urban Environment As An Human Right: the Missed Opportunity of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

Procedural Participation, the Role of Expert NGOs and Access to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

Article that discusses the active jurisprudential evolution of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR Court). Through a literature review and within Public Law and the interface between Constitutional Law and International Law, the research has as its theme the jurisprudential evolution of the Inter-American Court, with the objective of analyzing the transition from an "optional" jurisdiction to qualify as a "mandatory" jurisdiction before the States Parties and International Human Rights Law. As a hypothesis, it is believed that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights "was born" as an "optional" jurisdiction at the international level; however, with the judgments and the jurisprudential construction, it came to be considered a "mandatory" jurisdiction for States in matters of human rights. As a result, it was found that the hypothesis of the was partially confirmed. The use of the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights becomes an instrument of legitimacy for the ICC for the application of an international criminal law that seeks the protection of fundamental rights. This demonstrates that in order to be used as a source of human rights at the international level, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights establishes itself in the international arena as a true jurisdiction, whose effects transcend the reality of the States Parties and contribute to the construction of the normative acquis at the international level. It was noticed with the research that the Inter-American Court, through its jurisprudence, sought to qualify itself as a mandatory jurisdiction in matters of human rights, both before States and at the international level. This argumentative structure demonstrates the change in perspective of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which ceased to emphasize monetary reparations and began to concern itself with the material aspects of human rights, an indication that its "active" development has established it as a "mandatory" jurisdiction at the international level.

These Rules regulate the organization and establish the procedure of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

In 2001, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) seminally found self-amnesty laws on serious human rights violations to be null and void. However, later national reactions showed that this supranational control has faced challenges. Such supranational judicial authority has been exercised where amnesty laws and other exemption measures blocked judicial cases, democratic referendums upheld legislation, and peace-making processes existed.This article seeks to determine whether the traditionally interventionist jurisprudence of the IACtHR on amnesty laws/exemption measures has been legitimate under global constitutionalism standards. The standards considered are: human rights, namely, rights of victims of mass atrocities; consistency or coherence of this jurisprudence with international, regional and national practices; and democratic legitimacy and/or accountability considerations.Victim rights have underlain the IACtHR’s jurisprudence on amnesty laws and similar measures. Importantly, developments on victim rights are not exclusive to the IACtHR as case law of other supranational human rights bodies evidences. Among human rights courts and bodies, the IACtHR has exercised the highest level of control over amnesty laws/exemption measures, even nullifying national legislation. However, the IACtHR’s case law shares common principles with UN/regional jurisprudential developments and domestic practices in terms of inadmissibility of amnesties and other exemption measures in cases of serious abuses. Unlike the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the IACtHR has not deferred to sovereign state appreciation (conventionality control doctrine). Nevertheless, the IACtHR has arguably begun to move towards more ‘moderated’ approaches. This is advisable under democratic legitimacy considerations.

To better understand the dynamics between states and international human rights courts, international relations scholars must incorporate a systematic understanding of how nongovernmental rights activists influence the decisions of international human rights courts—for instance, the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights—and the impacts of those decisions on the ground, despite growing state backlash against international human rights courts. To date, several bodies of literature have considered these questions, but none have placed nongovernmental activists’ roles in full focus. The international relations and international law scholarship on judicialization of international politics and state compliance often acknowledges but does not thoroughly examine the role of activists in international law. In contrast, a second body of scholarship, on transnational advocacy networks and legal mobilization, often does theorize the role of activists in international and domestic politics but rarely focuses on activism in international human rights courts. While both bodies of literature acknowledge that nonstate actors influence the practice of international human rights courts, they have not proposed an analytical framework that encapsulates the dynamic relationships among nonstate actors, states, and international human rights courts. By proposing a framework on these relationships, we argue that, beyond simply influencing the outcome of a case in an international court, rights activists—whether NGOs or individual cause lawyers—have multiple reverberating effects upon all stages of case development and political impact. We identify and illustrate three fields in which the strategic efforts of activists play out, with significant consequences for courts’ authority over time. These fields are: (1) strategic litigation activity, (2) advocacy to improve states’ implementation of international human rights courts’ jurisprudence, and (3) responses to state backlash. Taken together, these fields can point us to an analytical path to study the practices of rights activists at international courts.

In a region rich in natural resources, where miningMining and exploration and exploitation of oil and gas have featured prominently, the Inter-American System of International Protection of Human RightsInter-American System of International Protection of Human Rights has acted as a forum for the settlement of environmental disputes Environmental harm via the gateway of human rights claimsHuman rights claims. It has in this manner contributed, already for decades, to the justiciabilityJusticiability of environmental issues using an evolutive and systemic interpretation of the rights under the American Convention on Human RightsAmerican Convention on Human Rights. This chapter examines the doctrines, contributions, and procedural tools at the disposal of the Inter-American System (with a particular focus on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights)Inter-American Court of Human Rights, as a forum resolving disputes involving environmental matters and providing protection for the environment. The chapter identifies the weaknesses and strengths of the system in dealing with environmental cases and the impact its case law is having on the development of international environmental law. This includes examining the ground-breaking ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Advisory Opinion 23Advisory Opinion 23 on Environment and Human Rights, arguably the most significant ruling on environmental issues of any international court to date. It is posited that the Advisory Opinion not only recognises the right to a healthy environmentHealthy environment as fundamental to the existence of humanity, but also that it has the potential to unlock real cross-border remediesRemedies for victims of environmental degradationEnvironmental degradation, including influencing climate change litigationClimate change litigation across the globe. The chapter closes by looking into the emerging jurisprudence after this crucial development, with the first contentious case acknowledging the right to a healthy environmentHealthy environment under the American Convention on Human RightsAmerican Convention on Human Rights (the Lhaka Honhat caseLhaka Honhat case).

Climate change is the justice challenge of our century, and the increasingly serious impacts of climate change on human societies and ecosystems are raising important international legal challenges. States and stakeholders are appealing to international courts for clarity concerning their responsibilities in the global response to climate change, as well as their accountability for climaterelated loss and damage. Through advisory proceedings, these institutions are being asked to clarify the legal obligations of States in addressing climate change, including the prevention of ocean impacts, the protection of human rights, and in international law more broadly. The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) are at the forefront of such proceedings with the potential to reshape international climate law and governance. In this article, expert legal scholars highlight the significance of climate advisory proceedings in these tribunals, briefly underlining the legal reasoning of the ITLOS advisory opinion, its implications for international climate governance, and the questions and arguments before the IACtHR and the ICJ. The article explores, in the context of global efforts to implement the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and other climate litigation including in international courts and tribunals, the transformative potential of recent advisory opinions sought from the ITLOS, the IACtHR and the ICJ. In their responses to the pressing need for legal clarity in a world grappling with unprecedented climate challenges, the article suggests, courts are offered an historic opportunity to shape the contributions of international law to global sustainability, justice and the survival of life on Earth.

Tem main objective of this work is to present the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS) to the legal professionals in Brazil, in particular to Brazilian judges. To accomplish that, we review the worldwide change of perspective concerning human rights that transpired as of 1948, by means of a new conception thereof. State sovereignty is relativized. The UN is organized, the Global Human Rights Regime is formatted, and, in its wake, the regional human rights regimes are also established. One by one, the European, African, and the incipient Arab and Asian regional human rights regimes are referred to and contextualized. At this point of the research, we focus on the Inter-American Human Rights System, the regional human rights regime of the Americas, and point out its origin, organs and normative instruments. Among its organs, we highlight the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as the court of last resort for the interpretation of the several normative instruments of the system, among which we point out the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR) as the most important. Also known as Pact of San Jos, Costa Rica, this convention establishes a unique and efficient system of state responsibility for the infringement of its precepts. Pursuant to the ACHR, complaints under the IAHRS shall be made before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, whose competences are also reviewed. In order to grant to the reader an in-depth knowledge on the guarantees of an independent, impartial, and preappointed judge, the second chapter of this work focuses on the case law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. We set forth several litigation cases and one advisory opinion to convey to the reader a precise notion of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights's construction of such guarantees. In the third chapter, from the concepts of an independent, impartial and pre-appointed judge in Brazil, we make a comparison with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights's case law and demonstrate that it is essential that Brazilian judges be acquainted with the IAHRS case law to necessarily apply it, whereas failing to do so may subject the State of Brazil to international responsibility. Themes such as the hierarchy of international treaties in Brazil, control of conventionality, and communication among courts are also reviewed in order to provide the reader with a broad perspective of the influence of the IAHRS on the Brazilian Laws.

Sonia Picado, First Woman Judge On The Inter-American Court of Human Rights Jo M. Pasqualucci (bio) I. Introduction Sonia Picado, the first and only woman judge on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights [hereinafter the Inter-American Court or Court] has resigned her position on the Court to become the Costa Rican Ambassador to the United States, a position that is statutorily incompatible with a judgeship on the regional court. 1 Judge Picado has dedicated her career to public international law and especially to international human rights law. In 1993, she was awarded one of the prestigious United Nations Human Rights awards for “Extraordinary Efforts in [the] Protection and Promotion of Human Rights.” 2 The honorary award recognized Judge Picado as a “major promoter of human rights in the [Latin American] region.” 3 Judge Picado has made contributions to human rights and to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as both a scholar and a woman. Her presence and her perspective will be missed. [End Page 794] II. Personal Background Sonia Picado was the oldest of three children born to Antonio Picado and Odilie Sotela de Picado. Her father, the youngest magistrate to be named to the Costa Rican Supreme Court, was one of the predominant influences in her life. Antonio Picado, who became well known in Costa Rica for his honesty and his dedication, was the eighth of nine children born to a poor family in a small Costa Rica town. His mother, like so many other Latin American women, struggled to take care of her large family without much help from her husband. When young Antonio won a scholarship to study in the capitol of his province, the town’s people took up a collection to buy him clothes and shoes. The image of her father in his struggle to better himself and to lift his family above poverty had a tremendous effect on Sonia Picado’s life. “He taught me that the least that I could do in life was to try to see that others have the same opportunities that I’ve had.” 4 One of Antonio Picado’s favorite sayings was, “hands that give are always full.” 5 This, according to Sonia Picado, influenced her to give priority to causes that in one form or another could help people. 6 Young Sonia spent two of her formative high school years studying in the United States. At the Holton Arms, an all girls’ school in Washington D.C., 7 she was taught that an academic education is important for women as well as for men. Women’s education at that time in Costa Rica focused on languages, music, and art, rather than basic sciences, history, and courses that would prepare young women to work outside of the home. After completing high school in Washington, Sonia wanted to remain in the United States to complete her university studies, but she complied with her parents’ wishes and returned to Costa Rica. Like many girls in Latin America, Sonia married young and soon had a child. She refused, however, to give up her dream of attending a university. After the birth of her first daughter, she insisted on beginning her university studies in law—an undergraduate degree in Costa Rica. In the 1960s it was very unusual for a woman, especially a married woman, to study at the university. There was only one other woman in Sonia Picado’s class. Although it would have been much more convenient for her to drive to class, her husband would not allow her to go to the university in an [End Page 795] automobile, because it would not be appropriate for a woman. Instead she awoke at 5:00 a.m. to take care of home responsibilities before taking an early bus across town. She studied half time so that she could make a good home for her family. Nevertheless, shortly after the conclusion of her studies, she found herself the divorced mother of two children. Sonia Picado was in the first class of students who voluntarily performed legal services while attending law school. A year of legal assistance in areas such as criminal, labor, and family law has...