Highlights
Despite constitutional guarantees and sustained investments under the Enhancing Access to Justice through Institutional Reform Project-II (A2J Project 2021–2026), women, Dalits, persons with disabilities (PWDs), LGBTIQ+ individuals, and poor and marginalized communities in Nepal continue to face persistent and intersecting barriers to accessing justice. The Post Assessment Report (2025), conducted by the Hilly Region Development Campaign (HRDC),Jajarkot under the A2J Project, confirms that legal aid services remain largely centralized, urban-biased, and insufficiently responsive to the needs of rural and marginalized populations, particularly in remote districts of Karnali Province such as Dolpa and Jajarkot. In Mudkechula Rural Municipality (Dolpa) and Barekot Rural Municipality (Jajarkot), geographical isolation, fragile institutional presence, limited digital connectivity, and high poverty incidence significantly constrain access to courts, legal aid providers, and grievance redress mechanisms.
The post-assessment of the access to justice situation in Karnali further identifies intimidation, procedural delays, institutional bias, and low levels of trust as major deterrents for women and marginalized groups seeking justice. Persistently low rates of vital civil registration—birth, citizenship, and marriage—continue to undermine legal identity, access to public services, and effective grievance redress, particularly among Dalits, women-headed households, and persons with disabilities in Karnali Province.
These longstanding structural constraints were further exacerbated in 2025 by widespread Gen-Z-led protests against corruption, impunity, and weak accountability across executive, judicial, and legislative institutions. The resulting damage to courts, police offices, and prisons led to prolonged court closures, disrupted judicial services, increased case backlogs, and severely restricted public access to justice. In remote local governments such as Mudkechula and Barekot where communities already depend heavily on physical access to district-level justice institutions these disruptions deepened exclusion, delayed grievance resolution, and intensified perceptions of institutional fragility. Although emergency support measures and accelerated digitalization helped restore essential e-judiciary functions, the scale of institutional damage and incidents of prison breaks generated lasting fear and uncertainty among citizens, particularly women and marginalized communities who already face social stigma, unequal power relations, and fear of retaliation when engaging with formal justice institutions. National survey, 2021 evidence indicates that caste-based discrimination remains pervasive affecting nearly 70% of respondents and continues to erode confidence in police, judicial committees, and grievance mechanisms, reinforcing under-reporting and social silence in rural areas of Karnali.
Furthermore, while legal awareness levels are moderate at the national level (approximately 59.8%), awareness alone has not translated into effective access to remedies in remote municipalities. More than 78% of surveyed respondents recommend stronger, localized legal awareness and outreach programs, while over two-thirds identify the absence of accessible and responsive grievance mechanisms as a critical gap, particularly for women, Dalits, PWDs, and sexual and gender minorities. In Mudkechula and Barekot, inaccessibility of legal information driven by language barriers, low literacy levels, lack of sign-language interpretation, absence of braille or audio materials, and limited user-friendly digital platforms continues to systematically exclude persons with disabilities, elderly citizens, and illiterate populations from justice services. Empirical studies by the International Commission of Jurists and Amnesty International consistently affirm that procedural inaccessibility, discriminatory attitudes, and weak enforcement of protective laws disproportionately disadvantage women, Dalits, and persons with disabilities, with these challenges being most acute in remote and underserved provinces such as Karnali.
Although the A2J Project recorded a 40% increase in legal aid beneficiaries in 2025, reaching 58,480 people nationwide (57% women), these gains remain fragile without deeper institutionalization of people-cantered, inclusive, and accountable justice mechanisms at the local level. In Mudkechula Rural Municipality and Barekot Rural Municipality, weak grievance handling systems, limited presence and engagement of civil society organizations, inadequate outreach desks within judicial committees, and insufficient youth and community participation constrain both sustainability and responsiveness. This underscores the urgent need to strengthen accessible online and offline grievance registration systems, expand Hello CM, Namaste Mayor, and Online Help Desk mechanisms to these underserved local levels, and empower women and marginalized groups through targeted legal awareness, youth-led outreach, community facilitation, and institutional capacity building. Addressing these gaps is critical to restoring public trust, enhancing accountability, and advancing a people-cantered justice system that effectively serves the most marginalized populations of Karnali Province.
To contribute people-centered, inclusive, and accountable justice systems at the sub-national level by empowering women, youth, and marginalized communities and improving accessible grievance redress and judicial services in Karnali Province.