Under the Supreme Court's Strategic Plan of 2002, the following measures were taken to enhance women's access to justice: (a) implementation of a pilot project for providing access to justice to low-income social groups in various parts of the country; (b) promotion of rural women's access to justice through the expansion of the Programme of Rural Judicial Facilitators, for whom an early mediation manual has been drawn up; (c) establishment of service, mediation, information and orientation centres (CAMINOS) to provide alternative dispute resolution services in remote Atlantic coastal areas, using customary law as a basis for community mediation; (d) implementation of a care programme for victims of domestic or sexual violence in the autonomous regions of the Caribbean coast.

Similarly, to enhance women's access to justice, the Supreme Court has taken a number of specific measures, including the following: (a) establishment of a National Gender Commission in the judicial branch of the Nicaraguan Government; (b) creation of a gender mainstreaming programme in the Judicial School; and (c) mainstreaming of the gender perspective in the Code of Criminal Procedure reform process, particularly with regard to gender-based violence. This last measure resulted in the preparation of an assessment of evidentiary procedure in cases of domestic or sexual violence against women, children and adolescents in Nicaragua, the design of a protocol for dealing with offences involving domestic abuse and sexual aggression, the training of a multidisciplinary team (comprising officials of the National Police, public defenders, female judges, Institute of Forensic Medicine staff and NGO representatives) in implementing the protocol and the conduct of a course on forensic psychology, with emphasis on domestic and sexual violence.

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