“It has been two years since I filed my case. Everyone told me the court would give me my rights, so I believed them. I waited. I am still waiting. Will I ever get justice?”
Shila is a Ready-Made Garment (RMG) industry worker in Bangladesh. In March 2024, she reached out to iProbono as she was being denied her rightful dower and maintenance. Her case reached court in July that year, yet it took close to two years for her husband to be formally notified.
I think about her often. Not because her case is unusual, because, despite having followed all the rules, the system has still not been able to show up for her the way it’s promised in theory. This is not a backlog problem. It is a systemic issue. And we need to confront it with that honesty.
A System Built for the Wrong Outcomes
Over 4 million cases were pending in Bangladesh’s Subordinate courts (District and Metropolitan level courts of civil and criminal jurisdiction) as of December 2025[1]. In cases of violence against women and children, the cases where stakes are highest and survivors are most vulnerable, the conviction rate stands at 3%, 70% of the accused are acquitted[2]. Women are being routed into a system that, by its own numbers, is not built to protect them.
The adversarial court process compounds this. Family disputes are not legal contests between equals, they involve power imbalances, ongoing relationships, economic dependency and emotional harm. A win or lose framework applied to maintenance disputes does not deliver justice, it delivers a verdict, eventually, to whoever survived the process longest. For women with limited resources, limited time, and lives that cannot be put on hold for years, waiting is not an option.
We have built a justice system that is structurally misaligned with the needs of the people who need it the most. And we still expect women to treat it as the only way out.
It is not.
An Alternative Legal Framework
Mediation, a process in which a neutral third party facilitates dialogue to reach a voluntary resolution without going to court, is one of several mechanisms within Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), alongside negotiation, conciliation, and arbitration. Where adversarial litigation fractures relationships and drags on for years, mediation preserves them, and resolves disputes in a fraction of the time.
Bangladesh’s legal framework has shifted significantly, and not enough people are talking about it. The Legal Aid Services (Amendment) Act, 2026, now makes pre-litigation mediation mandatory in many cases, with the explicit aim of ensuring litigants have access to timely justice without being absorbed into an overburdened court system. More importantly, it recognises certified settlements as court decrees, fully enforceable, with the same legal standing as a judgement. This is the critical breakthrough. The standard objection to mediation has always been enforcement: shalish (informal community settlements) collapse because there is nothing to compel compliance. That objection no longer holds.
Mediation is not a shortcut, nor is it a way of asking women to accept less so that courts are less burdened. Done poorly, mediation reproduces the same power imbalances as Shalish, a woman sitting across from her husband’s family, without legal knowledge, without representation, agreeing to terms below what the law entitles her to.
Done well, it is the opposite. A woman who knows her legal rights, what her nikahnama(registered marriage contract) provides, what the law requires on maintenance, what a fair settlement looks like, and negotiates from strength. Legal literacy, provided before mediation begins, is not a supplementary service. It is the foundation that makes mediation safe.
The Family Court Act, 2023 requires mediation before issues are even framed. Mandatory pre-litigation mediation is no longer an alternative to the justice system in Bangladesh, it has become an internal part of the justice process.
What This Means in Practice
Organisations like BRAC have been pioneering rights-based ADR in Bangladesh for decades, and their numbers bear this out[3]. In a recent reporting period, 70% of the 24,691 people who sought legal support through BRAC were resolved through Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR)[4]. The government’s Directorate of Legal Aid Services has resolved over 179,000 cases through ADR to date. Pre-litigation ADR, properly supported, works at scale[5]. Based on evidence published by BRAC, a mediation can be concluded within approximately 41 days[6]. What Shila did not have was that option, she chose the court, and still remains there.
What Changes When the First Conversation Is the Right One
iProbono’s Legal Aid Clinics, run in partnership with Kormojibi Nari, providing legal support to women who need it the most: it sends women into the world better informed. They arrive without clarity about their rights. They leave knowing what they are owed. Tani* was a beneficiary of our legal aid clinics, having been denied her rightful dower and the maintenance she was legally owed. A panel lawyer filed a civil suit on her behalf at a Family Court in Dhaka in September 2024. For one year, she waited not for a verdict, but simply for the summons to be served and returned.
In September 2025, one year after the suit was filed Tani received BDT 100,000 as dower and now receives BDT 4,000 per month for her children’s maintenance. Justice arrived not through a court judgment, but through a negotiated settlement between the parties. What made that settlement possible was not the litigation itself, it was what happened before it.
At the legal aid clinic, Tani learned what her nikahnama (kabinnama) provided, what the law entitled her to, and what a fair settlement looked like. When her husband later approached her to discuss terms, she already knew her position. She negotiated from knowledge, not uncertainty. This is what pre-litigation ADR is designed to create: a woman who arrives at any negotiation formal or informal already informed, already standing on solid ground.
The Wait Does Not Have to Be the Only Option
Pre-litigation mediation does not ask women to accept less. It asks the system to stop making women wait so long that acceptance becomes the only option left. Family disputes of this kind ordinarily take two to three years to reach a court judgment, if they reach one at all. Tani’s settlement took one year, already a year or two faster. Under the Legal Aid Services (Amendment) Act, 2026, a certified mediated settlement can now be reached in weeks, carrying the same legal weight as a court judgment. The difference is not in the outcome. It is in what it costs a woman to get there in time, in exhaustion, in the life she put on hold to wait for a system that was never designed to move at her pace.
Shila is still waiting. Tani waited a year and got what she was owed. The distance between their two stories is not luck, it is access to the right conversation at the right moment. That conversation is what pre-litigation ADR makes possible. The legal framework is already in place. What remains is to make it work in practice. As Bangladesh strengthens its legal framework for pre-litigation mediation, iProbono’s Legal Aid Clinics can become the first door to justice ensuring that women receive timely legal advice, understand their rights and legal options, and are equipped to make informed decisions about whether mediation or litigation is the most appropriate pathway for their circumstances. Where mediation is unsuitable, access to the courts remains unchanged. That is the promise of pre-litigation ADR: a first, faster door to justice that works alongside the courts, ensuring women reach the right pathway at the right time.
* Name changed to protect identity.
[1] https://www.thedailystar.net/news/bangladesh/news/over-40-lakh-cases-pending-lower-courts-4153401
[2] https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/dhaka/409181/study-conviction-rate-3%25-in-violence-against
[3] Alim A (2004). Shalish and role of BRAC’s federation: improving the poor’s access to justice, Graduate school of development studies, Dhaka: BRAC. (unpublished)
[4] https://www.giz.de/en/projects/prison-and-justice-reform-promoting-human-right-and-preventing-corruption-0
[5] https://www.bssnews.net/news/347444
[6] https://bigd.bracu.ac.bd/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Understanding-Alternative-Dispute-Resolution-for-the-Rural-Women-in-Bangladesh_-Some-Illustrations-From-BRAC-HRLS-Programpdf.
