Strategic Litigation Guide for Trade Unions and Workers’ Rights
Strategic Litigation Guide for Trade Unions and Workers’ Rights Litigation, and specifically strategic litigation, is already recognised by trade unions as an important, and sometimes the only, means to defend and advance trade union and worker’s rights and interests. Efforts to engage in relevant cases to defend rights have increasingly benefited from legal savviness with many active stakeholders working together. The aim of this Guide is to build on existing knowledge on how strategic litigation is successfully used, or not, bringing together insights from trade unions and workers’ rights and other related fields, such as human rights, to offer accessible legal and practical information that could benefit various actors in the field.
The principal goal is to offer guidance in understanding and applying strategic litigation, and to offer considerations to help you deciding whether you should pursue strategic litigation. The Guide brings together insights from international and European level remedies of both judicial and quasi-judicial nature. In Part I, the Guide aims to help you assess the legal and practical considerations from initiating a case and all through the final decisions and its aftermath. Part II aims to assist with legal details in offering the main procedural details relevant in determining whether your case can and should be heard at a particular avenue. Strategic litigation increases compliance with the law, strengthens existing rights by clarifying or filling gaps, and can be instrumental in overturning previous cases of detrimental effect for workers and trade unions. At the same time, it can be an expensive, time-consuming, and possibly a privileged avenue to defend or advance rights.
This Guide seeks to show all the nuances of strategic litigation in relation to the bodies and institutions relevant for trade unions and allow for informed decisions to be taken by lawyers, practitioners, and others who seek to engage in strategic litigation in this field. Ultimately, the aim of the Guide is to facilitate your work in making decisions whether to initiate a case and if you do, how to strategically build a map to lead to the intended favourable results.