Exploring the Many Faces of Advocacy in Social Justice

Advocacy is not a single act – it is a spectrum of strategies, each designed to address injustice at a different level. Whether a lawyer is fighting for a wrongly accused individual in a trial court, filing a PIL that reshapes national policy, or lobbying Parliament to amend a flawed law, they are all advocates. But the tools they use, the goals they pursue, and the arenas they operate in differ significantly. Understanding these distinctions is essential for anyone working in criminal justice – because choosing the right type of advocacy can mean the difference between a partial remedy and lasting systemic change.

What do we mean by “advocacy” in criminal justice? 🔗

At its core, advocacy is the act of speaking up or acting on behalf of those who cannot effectively do so themselves. In the criminal justice context, advocacy encompasses efforts to protect the rights of victims, accused persons, marginalized communities, and the public at large. The Indian criminal justice system has historically been accused-centric, which has pushed many legal practitioners and civil society organisations to explore a wider range of advocacy methods to fill the gap. Social advocates use tools ranging from awareness campaigns and policy research to direct legal representation and collaboration with government bodies like the National Human Rights Commission.

The key insight is that advocacy does not end inside a courtroom. It extends to legislatures, administrative agencies, community organisations, and public discourse. The major types of advocacy – case advocacy, cause advocacy, public interest litigation, legislative advocacy, and administrative advocacy – each serve a distinct purpose within this broader ecosystem.

Case advocacy: fighting for the individual 🔗

Case advocacy is the most direct and familiar form. It involves a lawyer or advocate representing a specific individual or group in a legal proceeding, working to secure the best possible outcome for that client. In the criminal justice system, this can mean defending an undertrial prisoner, securing bail for an innocent accused, or ensuring that a victim receives compensation.

What distinguishes case advocacy from other forms is its focus on the particular rather than the systemic. The goal is to resolve the immediate legal problem of the person in front of you. This requires direct persuasion – of judges, prosecutors, or tribunals – and a thorough command of facts, procedure, and law.

In India, the need for effective case advocacy is acute. Victims of crime are frequently left helpless when they enter the criminal justice system, with legal disability compounding other social and economic disadvantages. Victim advocates operating within this framework must understand both the emotional needs of the person they represent and the procedural complexities of the system they are navigating. A good case advocate does both.

Public interest litigation: advocacy through the courts for the many 🔗

When a problem affects not just one person but entire communities or the public at large, case advocacy is insufficient. This is where Public Interest Litigation (PIL) becomes the instrument of choice. A PIL is a petition filed in court not necessarily by the aggrieved party, but by any public-spirited individual or organisation, aimed at protecting collective public interests. It is a form of advocacy that uses judicial power to address systemic violations.

The PIL dilutes the traditional principle of locus standi, meaning that a person does not need to be directly affected by a wrong in order to seek its remedy in court. This was a transformative shift in Indian jurisprudence.

Origins and landmark cases in India 🔗

PIL in India took shape in the late 1970s, driven by judicial activists like Justice P.N. Bhagwati and Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer. One of the earliest landmark cases was Hussainara Khatoon v. State of Bihar (1979), where a petition filed about the condition of undertrial prisoners in Bihar jails led to the release of over 40,000 detainees who had spent more time in custody than the maximum sentence for their alleged offences. The case established the right to a speedy trial as a fundamental right.

Another defining moment was Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan, where frustrated by the criminal justice system’s failure to address Bhanwari Devi’s case, a lawyer filed a PIL in the Supreme Court challenging sexual harassment at workplaces, leading to guidelines that recognised such harassment as a violation of fundamental rights under Articles 14, 15, and 21. These guidelines remained the law until Parliament codified them in the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013.

PIL as a double-edged sword 🔗

PIL is powerful, but not without limitations. What began as a tool to give marginalised groups access to higher courts has, over decades, evolved into a forum that is sometimes used for private grievances, political motives, or media attention, raising the question of which public the PIL actually serves. For law students and practitioners, this is a critical lesson: the effectiveness of advocacy through PIL depends heavily on the bona fides of the petitioner and the strength of the public interest being asserted.

Cause advocacy: championing a broader issue 🔗

Where case advocacy addresses the individual and PIL addresses collective court-based remedies, cause advocacy takes a wider view. Cause advocates work on behalf of a social cause or a category of people – bonded labourers, child victims of trafficking, inmates in overcrowded prisons – rather than a specific client.

Social advocates in this space use strategies that include raising public awareness, building coalitions, contributing to policy research, and working with NGOs and government commissions like the National Commission for Women or the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights. The goal is not just to win a case but to shift public understanding and institutional responses over time.

Cause advocacy often works in tandem with other forms. For instance, the advocacy work done around bonded labour did not stop at winning individual cases – it contributed to a sustained campaign that eventually led to Supreme Court directives and legislative reforms. The advocacy around prison reform similarly combined case work, PIL, and public campaigning to push for structural change.

Legislative advocacy: changing the law itself 🔗

Sometimes the problem is not how a law is being applied but what the law says. Legislative advocacy is the process of engaging with Parliament or state legislatures to influence the creation, amendment, or repeal of laws. This is one of the most consequential forms of advocacy because it addresses the root cause of injustice at the level of legislation itself.

Legislative advocacy requires a long-term, persistent presence and patience to stay engaged with issues that may take years to resolve, often with only partial victories along the way. It involves drafting memoranda, presenting evidence to parliamentary committees, mobilising affected communities to speak to their elected representatives, and building coalitions with other civil society actors.

In India, this type of advocacy has produced significant results. The recent overhaul of India’s criminal law framework – replacing the IPC, CrPC, and Indian Evidence Act with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, and Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam – was preceded by years of recommendations from bodies like the Malimath Committee and the Law Commission of India. These recommendations represent legislative advocacy in its institutional form: sustained expert pressure on the Parliament to modernise the criminal justice system. The Centre for Legislative Research and Advocacy (CLRA), a national-level organisation in India, works directly with parliamentarians, civil society groups, and media to create informed participation in the law-making process.

Administrative advocacy: working within the system’s machinery 🔗

Laws do not enforce themselves. Once legislation is enacted, it is implemented through government agencies, police departments, prison administrations, district magistrates, and other executive bodies. Administrative advocacy involves engaging with these bodies to change the rules, policies, and procedures by which laws are actually put into practice.

Administrative advocacy includes influencing the regulations that government agencies use to implement laws – whether that means pressing a state police department to revise its arrest procedures, urging a prison authority to implement a legal aid programme, or demanding that a district administration properly implement victim compensation schemes.

The benefit of a favourable law can be entirely lost if it is poorly implemented, making administrative advocacy as important as the legislative advocacy that secured the law in the first place. In the Indian context, this is starkly visible in the implementation of victim compensation schemes under Section 357A of the CrPC (now BNSS), where advocates must often push district legal services authorities to actually disburse compensation that the law already mandates.

How these types of advocacy interact 🔗

In practice, effective advocacy rarely relies on just one approach. The trajectory of workplace sexual harassment law in India is a clear illustration: case-level advocacy in Bhanwari Devi’s matter fed into cause advocacy by women’s rights groups, which led to a PIL in the Supreme Court (Vishaka), which produced judicial guidelines, which were then reinforced through legislative advocacy that resulted in the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013, followed by administrative advocacy to ensure compliance mechanisms functioned.

Policy work, legislative advocacy, and litigation are closely related activities – policies shape laws, laws enable litigation, and litigation, in turn, reshapes policy. For criminal justice advocates in India, the ability to recognise which type of advocacy is needed in a given situation – and to combine multiple types strategically – is one of the most valuable skills to develop.

Each type of advocacy has its own logic, its own timeline, and its own metrics of success. Case advocacy delivers immediate relief. PIL can produce systemic judicial directives. Cause advocacy shifts the terrain of public understanding. Legislative advocacy rewrites the rules. Administrative advocacy ensures those rules are actually followed. Together, they form an integrated toolkit for justice.

What do you think? Given that legislative advocacy in India often takes years to produce results while the rights violations it seeks to address are happening in real time – how should criminal justice advocates decide where to concentrate their efforts? And with PIL in India increasingly being questioned for its potential misuse, do you think there are better mechanisms to ensure court-based advocacy genuinely serves the public interest it claims to protect?

References

1. https://theanalysis.org.in/exploring-the-need-and-growth-of-victim-advocacy-in-the-indian-criminal-justice-system/
2. https://www.lawentrance.com/article/social-advocate.html
3. https://byjus.com/free-ias-prep/public-interest-litigation-pil/
4. https://www.lawyered.in/legal-disrupt/articles/5-pil-cases-every-indian-must-be-grateful/
5. https://www.scobserver.in/75-years-of-sc/what-a-jagged-little-pil-the-peoples-court-at-75/
6. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/legal_aid_indigent_defense/resource_center_for_access_to_justice/standards-and-policy/updated-standards-for-the-provision-of-civil-legal-aid/appendix/guideline-d-1-on-legislative-and-administrative-advocacy/
7. https://prsindia.org/billtrack/overview-of-criminal-law-reforms
8. https://www.clraindia.org/trust.php
9. https://afj.org/resource/administrative-advocacy/
10. https://hrlibrary.umn.edu/edumat/IHRIP/ripple/chapter6.html