Reclaiming Justice: Challenging Punitive Systems and Advancing Rights

Women living with HIV and allies come together to share what justice looks like beyond courts and across everyday realities

At CSW70, ICW and partners brought together women living with HIV, advocates, and allies for a conversation grounded in lived realities and shaped by voices across regions. Facilitated by Sophie Brion, the discussion featured Medea Khmelidze, Rita Gatonye, Mariana Iacono, Nomtika Mjwana, Immaculate Owomugisha Bazare, and Dr. Sohier Elneil, creating space for honest reflections on stigma, criminalization, and the everyday impact of punitive systems.

Speakers shared how these systems are not only legal, but deeply embedded in daily life, shaping decisions, limiting autonomy, and often leaving women without safe or accessible paths to justice.

Across the conversation, several realities stood out:

• Experiences of criminalization often begin long before any legal process, through pressure, surveillance, and control in health and social settings

• Many violations go undocumented, making it harder to seek accountability and easier for systems to ignore them

• Women’s lives are shaped by multiple, overlapping factors that cannot be addressed in isolation

• Access to justice must go beyond courts and include care, support, and community-led responses

There was a shared recognition that women are too often reduced to a single identity, while their lives are far more complex. Seeing women as whole people, listening to lived experience, and responding accordingly remains central to any meaningful effort to advance justice.

The conversation also pointed to the importance of stronger connections across movements. Feminist advocacy, HIV responses, and human rights work are closely linked, and working together can help shift systems that continue to fall short.

This webinar opened a space for reflection, but also for moving forward. Keeping these conversations alive, documenting realities, and standing alongside those most affected remains part of the work ahead.