Katia Melis

Katia Melis is changing how the legal aid system is working in Belgium. Shifting from a hierarchical and unifocal to an eye-level, holistic practice, she empowers pro deo lawyers to coordinate systemic solutions by supporting legal aid seekers to navigate the jungle of finding adequate support for their multi-faceted issues.

Individuals seeking legal assistance in immigration, family, or youth law often find themselves falling through the cracks as they need more than just legal advice to resolve their issues. They often grapple with complex challenges that include administrative hurdles and the social and psychological impacts of their cases. Consequently, they rely heavily on fragmented social services, necessitating interactions with multiple agencies to address a single issue. Katia Melis, a trained human rights lawyer, decided to transform the approach to providing legal aid by shifting the role of lawyers to not only being service providers to clients but coordinators of different fields united by the idea of finding systemic solutions to individual situations.

Katia acknowledges that legal issues often intertwine with broader social, economic, and health-related challenges. As such, she is pioneering a holistic approach called SAHO (Service d’Accompagenment HOlistique), providing integrated legal assistance to underserved or marginalized populations, such as immigrants, refugees, or low-income families. Collaborating with social workers, psychologists, police, judges, prosecutors, public administration representatives, and other stakeholders, Katia’s organization, Casa Legal, ensures that people receive administrative, legal, social, and psychological support to address the root causes of their issues. For instance, a mother who has experienced domestic violence may require not only legal aid but also social (e.g., access to social housing) and psychological support (e.g., trauma therapy) to navigate her situation effectively. Casa Legal is providing these services in-house whilst also coordinating with other social organizations to ensure long-term support for these vulnerable groups. So far, they have handled cases of more than 1200 people, out of which 72% were women.

Katia’s holistic approach does not stop with the individual; she aims to make the field of legal and social services more organized and collaborative. While before, an individual had to deal with sometimes up to nine different stakeholders for the same issue, Casa Legal now coordinates the collaboration between those. Furthermore, holistic support is essential not only for beneficiaries but also for professionals: On one hand, the coordination between the different actors is making them work more efficiently, reducing redundancy and duplication of their actions. This leads to reduced costs and better handling of individual cases, rendering the welfare state more effective. On the other hand, creating bridges between them helps to deconstruct the stereotypes that the stakeholders hold against each other, fostering more empathy and collaboration between them, therefore integrating a collaborative mindset.

Katia has created a new, recognized non-profit vehicle for holistic services that is best fit to expand the legal aid infrastructure across Belgium in a coordinated manner while making it less costly for the government. To get to the national scale, she is now collaborating with the Federal Ministry of Justice to build and create the law that will establish Casa Legal in all Belgian regions in the next five years. Ultimately, Katia aims to create a similar success story as the “maison medicale” in the 1970’s that democratised access to healthcare for underserved communities.

Behind the legal issues of individuals, there are often social and psychological problems that exacerbate the precarious situations in which the victims find themselves. These issues can be of an administrative nature (e.g., access to social housing or access to residence permits/visas) or psychological issues (e.g., trauma after suffering from domestic violence). The current Belgian legal aid support is not designed to go into the root causes, as lawyers act in isolation to other services that support vulnerable communities in improving their situation.

On one side, the Belgian pro-deo legal aid system is incentivizing quantity over quality (lawyers being paid by the number of cases they handle). This means that providing legal aid to marginalized individuals who normally cannot afford legal support is only lucrative for lawyers if they can handle many cases simultaneously, as they are paid case by case. Therefore, individuals receive legal assistance, but the underlying root causes of their legal issues are not always identified and covered. At the same time, lawyers who want to do more qualitative work find themselves in a system where they cannot make an adequate living and become disincentivized to care for the people behind the legal issues, suffer burnout, or leave the profession entirely.

Conversely, complex administrative procedures inhibit individuals in need to effectively navigate the social service system. They become stuck in it or find themselves confronted with five social workers who are all handling their portfolios due to the complexity of their issues. This inefficacy costs a lot of (public) money but also leads to even more stress for people in vulnerable situations. Around one case, it is possible that around nine stakeholders (i.e., social worker, psychologist, lawyer, police, social housing services, judge, prosecutor, doctors, local administration) can be involved, working with an individual without coordinating amongst one another. This leads to information gaps, different sources of truth, and significant duplication and redundancy.

Lastly, on many of the topics that concern people who need legal aid support, there is a lack of good precedents that lawyers can use. Very often, Belgian law does not meet the obligations provided by EU directives, and sometimes, EU directives also violate constitutional processes. The lack of precedents and compliance with continental and global law results in individual beneficiary cases that are badly decided as courts make bad decisions because they don’t have good decisions to look at and the law is not written well. These legal system gaps require systemic solutions often not pursued by the chronically overworked pro-deo lawyers.

At the core of Katia’s work stands the SAHO (Service d’Accompagenment HOlistique) methodology, holistic accompaniment services, where individuals are being referred by social organizations, the police, hospitals, or other network partners to Casa Legal to receive the right support for their complex life and legal situations.

In a first conversation, Katia’s team will identify the dimensions of support that are needed for the person to manage their difficult situation. Then, they will be supported according to their situation in a holistic manner by a lawyer, a social worker, and a psychologist, who will analyze what kind of services the person will need and then either perform them themselves or guide people to the right partner organizations. Katia’s team stays at eye level with the people and supports them in going to the police or any other actors that might be intimidating for a person to go there alone. Through this equitable approach, people are not even more stressed by the systems surrounding their legal complaints.

A key work of Katia is coordinating the sector so that the stakeholders around individuals work around the person. For this, Katia aims to change the way lawyers interact with the system they are embedded in by fostering collaboration and breaking down silos between different professions, such as lawyers, psychologists, social workers, police officers, administrators, prosecutors, researchers, human trafficking & domestic violence departments of police stations and judges. Through their "Atelier de Decloisonnement" (unboxing workshops), they create a safe space for dialogue and collaboration between these normally siloed actors, leading to better handling of cases and a more appropriate approach towards people in need. Together with the stakeholders, they build materials on how to handle specific cases from the different professional perspectives. By creating shared approaches on how to handle certain cases (e.g., women who have been victims of domestic violence), Katia is embedding more collaboration into the sector. For this to happen, Casa Legal collaborates with other non-profit organizations to shed light on how legal procedures can effectively advance their stakeholders’ cases and incentivize more collaboration in the associative field between different social organizations. They are increasingly becoming the voice of the “socio-legal” sector towards decision-making institutions.

Casa Legal is also increasingly putting an emphasis on identifying strategic litigation cases. Katia, having a track record of such activities, sees this as a key role for Casa Legal’s role as a coordinator to also advance legal cases that will create the precedents needed to provide better solutions to people with intersectional issues. They have filed more than 60 strategic litigation cases. In a popular example, in 2023 – Katia brought the Belgian Labour Court to challenge the constitutional court on the issue of registering people who don’t have a fixed address. A fixed address is especially important for people who are seeking employment. Katia and her team successfully argued that the inability to obtain an address of reference for homeless people creates a vicious cycle that prevents these individuals from seeking employment due to the lack of registration, despite their automatic right to be registered upon proof of their European citizenship. This situation results in discrimination against them, contrary to Articles 10 and 11 of the Constitution. The constitutional court is currently investigating the case, with policies being developed to allow homeless people to register with local Social Security offices to get a pro forma address.

Katia, step-by-step, is building the blueprint of how their model works, what impact it has and how it can be replicated. For this she is smartly building alliances across the political spectrum to ensure that her work is recognised and appreciated by all political parties. She already achieved that the socialist party integrated Casa Legal’s approach into a resolution, whilst the greens introduced a law proposal in the federal parliament. This opened the door for Katia to negotiate with the government to structurally fund Casa Legal and to provide the law proposal with data on how much government expenditure the approach is saving whilst also increasing collaboration amongst stakeholders and providing improved legal support to vulnerable individuals. For this, they are currently collaborating with two universities to describe their model in full depth and measure its economic and social impact. Her goal is to turn their practice into a law that will oblige all Belgian regions to create "Casa Legal" replicas, ensuring a systemic impact on access to holistic legal support throughout Belgium. Included in this proposal is the notion of creating a self-regulatory organization that will ensure the quality of other Casa Legal’s and support existing lawyers in integrating Casa Legal’s approach into their practice.

To date, Katia and her team have supported more than 1,200 people in legal matters, 72% of them women. She has led around 75 strategic litigation cases. Additionally, they have trained over 1,000 police officers, attorneys, public administrators, social organizations, and other stakeholders through their unboxing workshops. Their efforts have been recognized as best practice by the Brussels Bar Association and as an innovation by several political parties, which have included their initiatives in their programs for better legal support.

Katia Melis has grown up in a very socially engaged home, with both parents being GPs in the poorest neighborhoods of Brussels. Whilst her father was involved in one of the first “maison medicale” ever, her mother became increasingly politically engaged, ending up in the running for regional elections. Coming from such an environment, the debate on how to use one’s privilege for the community hence has been an implicit guiding star in Katia’s life. Therefore, it seemed logical for Katia, being an enthusiastic theater actor who loved to have (and win) arguments, to pursue legal studies to focus on human rights.

After very successful studies, with several recognitions, her professional career made her realize quickly that the system was not designed for engaged lawyers who put qualitative client-centered legal work upfront. The “caring” element that was so important for her would not be remunerated in her field of pro deo human rights law. The remuneration system for pro-deo lawyers who were working with people in poverty incentivized lawyers like her to do quick, low-quality work as they were paid by cases handled and not by outcomes.

Disillusioned by this quantity-over-quality approach, Katia realized that she was alienating herself from her profession, which she had been very passionate about. The only way she could work systemically was by leading strategic litigation cases, of which she was able to initiate 50 cases in her young career.

Considering doing something different with her life, she joined a leadership journey. However, here she realized that instead of abandoning her profession, it needed a new approach. The initial idea of Casa Legal was born. Talking about a more holistic approach to doing law, she realised that many other colleagues were enthusiastic about her idea, and quickly, she found 3 other lawyers who were motivated to start Casa Legal. As a first success, Katia successfully lobbied with the Belgian Bar Association that if she created a non-profit structure and hired lawyers as well as psychologists and social workers, they could collaborate on cases together whilst respecting the strict rule of confidentiality. The first Belgian-wide holistic non-profit law firm was created.