IMDHD

 

Citlali. AI for Women’s Justice in Mexico

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In Mexico, violence against women continues to be one of the greatest human rights crises. Every day, 10 women are murdered for gender-related reasons and thousands more have been victims of enforced disappearances, domestic violence and sexual abuse, most of them without achieving justice or punishment for the aggressors. In the face of this impunity, there is a need to create innovative tools to promote access to justice.

In order to demand compliance with the obligations of judges, women need to have accessible mechanisms for evaluation and information.

To this end, we present Citlali, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool designed to evaluate court rulings and criminal proceedings related to gender-based violence. Citlali not only identifies human rights violations and the lack of gender perspective in the courts, but rather serves as a basis for informed decision-making to transform the access to justice for Mexican women.

Three data to understand the magnitude of violence against women in Mexico:

Every day, 10 women are murdered for gender-related reasons.

Only 23% of these crimes get a conviction.

Domestic and sexual violence continue to be unpunished crimes.

More than 96% remain in impunity and there is no accurate data on convictions related to these crimes.

There are more than 30,000 disappeared women.

Between 2019 and 2022, only 141 convictions were issued for this crime.1 

Why do women have no access to justice in Mexico?

Delays in proceedings, the use of stereotypes, re-victimization, unequal treatment, lack of adequate legal advice and the absence of integral reparations, in addition to the lack of mechanisms for the evaluation of judges and transparency in their actions, are some of the elements that hinder access to justice for women.

In Mexico, the judiciary authorities have the constitutional and conventional duty to judge with a gender perspective and due diligence in all judicial processes involving women.

However, this is not always reflected in their actions and rulings and as a result, victims of gender-based violence have not yet been able to obtain adequate responses for their claims for justice.

Background

¿UNA SENTENCIA ES SINÓNIMO DE JUSTICIA? Cómo se vive un proceso judicial en México para víctimas de violencia sexual y violencia feminicida

For more than 6 years we have been legally representing victims of violence in their criminal proceedings to obtain truth, justice and reparations. Between 2022 and 2024 we obtained 19 judicial resolutions in cases of sexual and domestic violence, femicide and enforced disappearances against women and girls in which their aggressors were convicted.

We decided to analyze these sentences to see if the victims felt they had obtained justice, and if the authorities had acted with a gender and human rights perspective. The results were captured on a web page that we update on an ongoing basis.

Justification

    Considering that there is no system of permanent, continuous and individualized review of the actions of authorities of the justice system in Mexico, using AI as a tool to study the sentences and criminal proceedings of victims of violence allow us to:

    1

    Standardize the analysis under objective and peer-reviewed criteria

    2

    Efficiently monitor the performance of the authorities to reduce human error and process large amounts of information that would take a long time to do so manually).

    3

    Identify the specific human rights violations and deficiencies in the actions of judges with a tool that allows proposing concrete solutions to judicial institutions in the performance of their duties.

    To demand compliance with the judges’ obligations, women need accessible evaluation information mechanisms which do not yet exist. Therefore, we propose the creation of an accessible, objective, and efficient AI App called  “Citlali”, that allows the evaluation of the performance of judges so that women, authorities, NGOs, and any interested person can have access to this information and know whether judges fulfill their duties or not.


    Citlali’s Aims

    To analyze rulings

    Create a tool with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze rulings and criminal proceedings of violence against women and girls to identify:

      • Human Rights violations
      • Implementation of gender perspective
      • Discrimination or unequal treatment

      To create recommendations

      Identify the good and bad practices and create recommendations to the authorities so they can improve their performance.

      Open code

      Develop an accessible App that allows any person or institution to analyze and socially evaluate the actions of judicial bodies, with the purpose of having a social control mechanism, as well as democratizing knowledge and standards on human rights and gender perspective through its use in concrete cases.


        Methodology

        Our methodology is divided into two areas:

        Construction of analysis criteria and results 8 analysis categories:

        Each one contains between 5 and 15 indicators (or questions) to which a score from 0 to 100 is assigned depending on the performance. The categories are:
        Prompt justice, Judicial Performance, Evidence analysis and evaluation, Facts analysis and evaluation, Application of human rights treaties, Resolution, Integral reparations, Victims’ rights

        Construction of the AI Agent (Citlali)

        Using an OpenAI API (Application Programming Interface) we developed an “agent” to analyze texts of resolutions or transcripts of trial hearings and easily identify the moments in which there are human rights violations. An agent is an autonomous intelligence system that uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to solve specific tasks. We have named our “agent”, Citlali.
        The 8 analysis categories we created were numerically coded in order to be able to give a score at the end of the process.


        How does Citlali work?

        1. Citlali receives the case information (in pdf, video or audio) and processes it into a format that she can easily analyze.
        2. For each of the indicators within the 8 categories mentioned above, specific questions are issued so that Citlali can search for the answer in the processed documents provided. (E.g. Does the judge mention international human rights treaties?)
        3. Citlali gives the results with a score depending on the performance of the authorities (good, improvable, bad and very bad) as well as the categories in which good and bad practices were generated.

          Why will Citlali transform the access to justice for women in Mexico?

          Citlali’s evaluation will measure the performance of criminal justice systems in two categories:

          • Cases: It will indicate whether the criminal process complied with Human Rights and Gender Perspective parameters.
          • Authorities: It will evaluate the performance of judges in all cases in which they have participated.

          Citlali will be a useful and powerful tool for users to observe and follow up on the actions of judges, comply with standards in criminal proceedings, and strengthen social mechanisms of transparency and accountability of the judicial system.

          Citlali’s main objective is to transform the judiciary based on informed social demands so that they protect, respect, and guarantee the human rights of women victims of violence.

          CITLALI is:

          FREE ACCESS.

          It will be an open platform.

          EASY TO USE.

          It will be intuitive and can be used on any device.

          EFFECTIVE.

          It will generate fast and accurate results.

          EFFICIENT.

          It can process large amounts of information in a few minutes.

          RELIABLE.

          Its analysis parameters are based on national and international standards on human rights, violence against women, and gender perspective.

          INCLUSIVE.

          It will work “speech to speech” and will be translated into different languages spoken in Mexico.

          USEFUL.

          It will allow the exercise of social control and guarantee the right of access to information


          Who are we?

          Verónica Garzón, Ximena Ugarte and Lorena Vignau.

          Ximena and Veronica, are lawyers and women’s human rights defenders, with extensive experience in legally representing processes related to violence against women, we are both part of the IMDHD, a Civil Society Organization with 19 years of work in the defense and promotion of human rights in Mexico.

          Lorena studied physics and did her master’s degree in applied mathematics, since 2017 she has been professionally dedicated to data science and artificial intelligence.

          Poster Design

          Miguel Ángel Herández Reyes
          miguel.hdz.rys@gmail.com
          +52 1 56 5497 3169
          https://www.linkedin.com/in/miguel-hr/

          1. Impunidad Cero. “Impunidad en Delitos de Desaparición en México 2023” ↩︎