Across the world, justice defenders are facing common challenges such as structural inequality and exclusion, shrinking civic spaces, and rapidly eroding public accountability. The learning agenda for legal empowerment, convened by Namati and the Legal Empowerment Network, and supported by Canada’s International Development Research Centre, is a collective effort to identify what approaches work to uphold human rights in the face of these challenges, and to grow the global movement for justice. Eleven action research projects across 16 countries are undertaking projects on a variety of issue areas, from refugee rights to police abuse, urban poverty, land rights, and more. These projects will test new approaches and generate powerful insights on how legal empowerment strategies can build community power, increase participation of marginalized groups in decision-making, and generate systemic change.

From March 20 to 24, 2023 learning agenda participants from across the world will be gathering in Nairobi. Over five days, the group will share insights about the different strategies that they are using to build community power and drive systems change. They will share the practical strategies that they are using, workshop live challenges and identify common themes for collective reflection and exchange. They will explore various themes that cut across the different issue areas and contexts they work in. For example, the ways in which they engage the State, the strategies they use to increase participation of marginalized groups in decision-making, and how they combine law and organizing to build community power. To ground these discussions in a practical way, participants will visit the work of local legal empowerment organizations in Kenya. Most importantly, this in-person time will help create closer relationships among participants and will generate solidarity and excitement to power their ongoing work together!

The shared foundations we lay at the global convening will guide deeper reflection and exchange on common themes for the rest of the year and beyond. We look forward to sharing the emerging insights that emerge from this collective learning effort.

Stay tuned for reflections and photos from the global convening!

As countries respond to the pandemic, governments are asking for more powers and more funds. Restrictions are tightening, not only on freedom of movement, but also on freedom of information and freedom of expression. The security sector—police and military—are increasingly engaged in the enforcement of lockdowns, quarantines, and other government actions.

Is the pandemic being used as justification to entrench policies that constrict civic space? Is the crisis aggravating the human rights situation in many countries?

On Wednesday, June 10th, 2020, at 9am ET / 1pm GMT, members of the Legal Empowerment Network, CIVICUS, and the Justice For All campaign will host a virtual roundtable discussion on how grassroots justice groups can respond to the challenges of constricting civic space and increasing human rights violations during the pandemic.

Join us for a discussion with leading network members as we tackle questions such as:

• How do government responses affect the fundamental freedoms of association, assembly, and expression—of citizens, generally, and civil society, in particular?
• How does this crisis affect citizens’ access to information? Are right to information mechanisms and other accountability measures working during the pandemic?
• How is the human rights situation affected by the increasing role of the police and military in enforcing government actions?

Together, we will explore ways in which legal empowerment groups can contribute to a just response to the COVID-19 pandemic, protect their people and communities, and push back against rights violations and policies that further constrict civic space.

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By addressing these needs and more, grassroots justice defenders play an essential role in responding to the pandemic. But adapting to the evolving public health emergency—particularly while under quarantine conditions—poses a monumental challenge. Most legal empowerment groups are severely under-resourced and under threat.

We’ve partnered with the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies to produce a new brief for the Justice For All campaign that aims to address these barriers. “Grassroots Justice in a Pandemic: Ensuring a Just Response and Recovery” provides recommendations for policymakers, donors, and multilateral institutions on how to finance and protect grassroots justice defenders during and after the pandemic. Doing so will help the world to mount a just and equitable response to, and recovery from, the global crisis.

In the coming weeks, we will strengthen these recommendations with concrete examples submitted by members of the Legal Empowerment Network through the COVID-19 Justice Challenge. This will help us to seek support that truly reflects the needs of grassroots justice groups around the world.

We still have a chance to change that.

This week, the Task Force on Justice released one of the strongest endorsements of legal empowerment in any international document in history.

The Task Force, made up of governments, international organizations, civil society, and the private sector, came together to determine how countries can shift from justice for the few to justice for all by 2030.

As one of the civil society representatives on the Task Force, Namati’s CEO, Vivek Maru, goal was to sound the message of our movement: that progress towards justice requires giving people the power to know and exercise their rights.

The report doesn’t tiptoe around legal empowerment but rather embraces it as crucial to the achievement of the SDGs. “Legal empowerment helps people understand and use the law,” the Task Force finds. “It enables them to recognize legal problems when they arise and equips them with the skills and confidence to take action.”

Legal empowerment is essential not just for resolving individual disputes, but for “challeng[ing] powerful business and state interests” and “tackling the root causes of collective injustices.”

The report acknowledges that civil society has “a vital role to play in helping build trust in justice systems, by bringing justice closer to the people” and highlights the funding and protection challenges that stymie our community’s efforts.

The Task Force “supports the demand of the Justice For All campaign” and underscores that achieving the promise of the SDGs requires “recognizing grassroots justice defenders, financing them in ways that respect their independence, and protecting them from violence and coercion.”

The time is now to build long-term momentum. Use the Justice For All Action Pack to share the report’s recommendations with your government and highlight how civil society and government can work together to implement them.

Tap into the global energy around SDG16. At two moments in this Year of Justice — the High-level Political Forum and the UN General Assembly — governments will report for the first time on the progress they’ve made in delivering access to justice.

The Task Force report calls for governments to come to these events with concrete country-level commitments. Let’s use this window to shape what those commitments will be.

We cannot afford to have another year slip by without a hard charge towards justice. Our movement is helping to change the current trajectory. It’s high time our governments followed suit.

Download the full report here. 

These words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ring true today. Especially when justice defenders themselves are at risk.

Today, on MLK Day, Namati and the Justice For All campaign are launching a policy brief that offers recommendations on how governments, donors, and multilateral institutions can finance and protect grassroots justice defenders, and why these steps are crucial to achieving the promise of “justice for all” in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Grassroots justice defenders do the work of legal empowerment. They support vulnerable groups to contend with complex, broken, or corrupt legal systems, and apply skills like negotiation, organizing, and advocacy to help people overcome injustice.

Despite mounting need, their efforts are under-resourced and often under attack.

Aid funding towards justice has decreased by 40% in 4 years; the funding that does exist tends to go to top-down approaches rather than bottom-up.

Meanwhile, civil society space is shrinking. In 2018, 321 defenders in 27 countries were targeted and killed for their work—the highest number on record. Two-thirds of Global Legal Empowerment Network members report that they were threatened for carrying out frontline justice work.

This new policy brief is an essential tool for anyone who wants to change that.

Written in close consultation with partners and Network members, our community argues that without investing in legal empowerment and securing the safety of its champions, “justice for all” will remain empty rhetoric, leaving the majority of the globe without access to justice.

Recommendations to address financing challenges include:

• ensuring investments in legal empowerment don’t curtail the independence of justice defenders;
• tapping into sector-specific sources of funding in areas like land, environment, and health.

Recommendations to address protection challenges include:

• Protecting grassroots justice defenders from intimidation, harassment, and murder;
• prohibiting lawsuits whose main purpose is to harass justice defenders.

This Wednesday, January 23rd, we are hosting a webinar to discuss how this policy brief can serve as a template to drive advocacy around the SDGs in our respective countries and as part of a global movement for justice. We hope you will join us.

Governments must ensure that justice flows not only to the strongest, richest, or most powerful, but to everyone. Justice defenders help make that happen. It’s high time world leaders recognize that with both words and action.

Download the PDF of the policy brief here.

The slow burn of justice. In launching the “Resisting Injustice” blog series, Namati has evoked the powerful image of the arc of history bending towards justice and, in the process, a long history of calls to justice by such inspirational Americans as Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Parker. On questions of justice, I often turn to another well-worn image: the flame.

The flame of justice burns in all of us, across communities and generations. It is our shared dignity as well as our responsibility to nurture it so that it doesn’t go out or burn out of control – the proverbial forest fire – in such a way that one person’s or group’s pursuit of justice comes at the exclusion of others.

Across the world, the space for respectful debate and disagreement is rapidly shrinking. In some countries, populist movements have used a discourse of suspicion and intolerance to target disadvantaged groups, like refugees and migrants, while other countries have seen outright attacks on freedom of expression. Are the fires of justice growing too weak or raging out of control? It is not an easy question to answer in one go.

Like many, I was inspired and relieved a couple of months ago to see lawyers in major airports across the US come to the assistance of foreign nationals facing a government order that challenged many shared notions of justice. In that moment, we saw the power of the law to resist injustice in a moment of crisis (which also, as Irene Khan the Secretary-General of IDLO recently remarked, made lawyers “cool” again). It was a spark of justice that ignited the imagination of people across many boundaries. And we see those sparks in different legal empowerment efforts in countries around the world. This example of a community in Duah, Liberia confronting a village leader on a crony land deal is one of many that jump to mind.

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Next to such moments, research or evidence-building – the main tools my colleagues at Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and I support in promoting justice globally – might appear somewhat unglamorous. Yet while the “sparks” are instrumental to lighting new flames, or reviving smothered ones, they are not enough to sustain the flame of justice. Ensuring respect for justice and the most basic of rights is a long-term and incremental struggle, requiring concerted efforts by many actors and, often, entailing big shifts in how groups, communities, and societies organize and see themselves. It is a slow burn. Here is where we see the power of research: building better knowledge on how people confront and can overcome justice challenges is a crucial element in sustaining that flame. Without it, we risk fumbling in the dark or trying to torch competing views through force of conviction alone.

A spark leads to a flame, many flames. The attack on critical thought and established truth, which has defined various populist movements, has challenged some of the work I support in a new, even existential, way. In the face of such threats, what role can research play in overcoming justice and larger social problems?

As a starting point, I would venture that current threats to evidence and ‘truth’ do not diminish but in fact reaffirm their importance. Research, when done well, reflects many of the basic notions of justice that we now see under threat. The search for greater knowledge conditions us not to take our own views and experiences as a given but to test our assumptions.

Much of the justice-oriented research my colleagues and I support aims to help populations gain a deeper understanding of their justice challenges (through various participatory and action-oriented processes) and, in turn, how they can be empowered to claim their rights and seek better opportunities. We believe that the actors living closest to a set of challenges are the one best placed to understand them and identify solutions that will bring about lasting change. When given a chance to weigh in on basic questions of justice, people become engaged. Often they express a desire for greater awareness: to understand better the various processes, policies or challenges affecting them. And with a deeper sense of the issues at stake generally comes a desire to know how to meaningfully come together so that their voices are heard. Justice, the flame, burns at a deeply personal level, across countries and socio-economic groups.

In successful, inspiring instances, research efforts can spark collective action, as people take steps together to assert their rights and light the path for large-scale change. In Nairobi, Kenya, IDRC research partners developed deeper evidence on life in Mukuru, an informal settlement of around 100,000 households. The research team, led by Akiba Mashinani Trust, then shared findings on sanitation conditions with participating women community leaders. At the same time, the team provided information about how those conditions did not meet with their constitutional rights.

 
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With this new awareness, the women organized a petition, then took to the streets to claim their rights to sanitation. Those and other advocacy efforts caught the attention of public officials, which provided an opening for the partners to engage in a larger process of dialogue. The team’s deeper set of findings, along with a corresponding series of tailored solutions, convinced officials that change in an otherwise forgotten part of the city was not just urgent but possible. The team and city government are now working together, along with residents, to start redeveloping the settlement.

Populist forest fires? What has been most troubling about the populist waves in recent years is how they demonstrate the negative power of collective action. While it might be tempting to dismiss many of those movements as ill-informed or misguided, they have in many cases been framed using a language of injustice, such as a (perceived) lack of economic opportunity or a disconnect from political leaders and processes. In seeing injustice in their own struggles, however, these movements have failed to recognize the injustice they have inflicted on others in the process.

At IDRC, we see the power of building new evidence in helping to break down what are seen as insurmountable challenges or in injecting a common ground for dialogue on divisive or ‘no go’ issues. Now more than ever, we need to hold true to the important commitment of meeting people where they are, of humanizing issues and building mutual understanding by ‘talking with people in real life‘. That reflex to seek understanding is central to the critical engagement and curiosity that define research and justice. The challenges posed by recent populist waves help us to reframe basic long-standing research questions with a new urgency, such as:

• How do we promote meaningful and mutually respectful engagement with and among citizens on important issues when suspicion, anger, and division between populations groups is on the rise?
• How can we best ensure that populations, including the vulnerable or hardest to reach, have the knowledge and resources to access justice in an era of economic hardship and closing spaces for expression?
• How can we best combine efforts to empower groups to claim their rights – through legal empowerment and collective action – with efforts to ensure public officials, laws, and institutions are responsive to those groups’ needs, desires, and basic rights?

These are core questions that, along with dedicated actors across the Global South, my colleagues and I will be addressing in IDRC’s Governance & Justice group in the coming years. We invite others to join us, in the shared commitment and resolve, to nurture this slow – yet urgent – burn.

Across the world, communities are being displaced and denied access to their land and natural resources on an industrial scale. Global investment in natural resource exploitation is having profound effects on who can use land and resources — creating opportunity for some, but having devastating impacts on many. At the same time, the courageous community organizers and national advocates who work to challenge irresponsible resource developments must overcome huge gaps in power and information between themselves and the proponents of developments.

But exploitative and irresponsible resource development is not inevitable.

Lawyers for Resource Justice is a new collaboration between Namati, International Senior Lawyers Project and Avaaz. This initiative connects grassroots organizations with volunteer international lawyers who provide customized, high-power legal support to empower vulnerable communities to use the law to protect their rights and amplify their voice internationally.

We believe that communities and national advocates, not external experts, are the leading agents of social change. At the same time, these local champions can often benefit significantly from the support of international lawyers who can help hold international investors to account in their home jurisdictions. The purpose of Lawyers for Resource Justice is to offer communities and national advocates increased access to customized, strategic legal support when and how they choose.

Collaborations between local advocates, community organizers, and international lawyers can effectively support communities to protect their rights, lands, and environment. Cases like the ones highlighted on our website from Cambodia, Liberia, and Kenya demonstrate how communities and grassroots advocates can leverage international legal support to hold governments and investors accountable if they fail to protect and respect human rights.

Organizations can request legal support at resourcejustice.org. There is no application deadline, but we cannot guarantee assistance to all applicants. We strongly encourage applications from groups working on proposed or anticipated resource development projects. The earlier we start, the more legal strategies are available.

We believe that collaboration between international and local experts can build vital supports for communities to prevent and remedy damages from resource development in their homelands. Working together, grassroots communities, national advocates, and international allies can defend a true rights-based approach to resource development.

Apply here now

Read our post on the IIED blog

Read our post on the Devex blog

Marena Brinkhurst is the Program Associate with Namati’s Community Land Protection program.

More and more lawyers and front line legal advocates are stepping forward to defend communities’ rights, yet they often struggle to find supportive legal precedent – within their own country or from abroad. Accessing relevant case law can be difficult, especially when records are not digitized or available online. Too often advocates work in isolation, unaware of successful arguments and strategies from other nations that they could leverage.

To address this need, Namati created CaseBase – the first free, online, searchable database of case law from around the world relevant to communities’ rights to land and natural resources.

Explore CaseBase

The goal of CaseBase is to help communities and their advocates to craft and share successful litigation strategies for the protection of lands and natural resources. The database provides concise case summaries and full-text court decisions from national, regional and international courts. Some highlights from the database include:

The landmark Endorois ruling on indigenous land rights in Kenya

SATIIM’s victory for indigenous and community rights in Belize

A foundational case for indigenous rights around the world from Australia

While our team will be constantly seeking and uploading new cases, the growth of CaseBase depends on participation by lawyers and advocates around the world. Please join us in using the database, adding comments and updates, submitting cases, and helping to spread the word.

CaseBase is one of many resources designed for the Global Legal Empowerment Network. Join now to connect with allies and access other tools.

The Legal Aid Reformers Network (LARN) recently re-designed and re-launched its new website: www.legalaidreform.org.

The redesign improves the functionality and user-friendliness of the website – come and have a look at the great resources and news items that are now available.

The website stores and shares information on the right to legal aid and effective defence in Europe and globally, bringing together information on the legal frameworks, comparative overviews and country information, research and studies, and tools for managers and practitioners. Resources that you may be interested in include summaries of legal aid issues in individual countries; fact sheets and case summaries from the European Court of Human Rights; and practical resources for police station legal advice schemes.

In particular, a new publication from the Open Society Justice Initiative looks at the impact that defense lawyers and paralegals can have when they can reach individuals soon after an arrest, and how early intervention can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the broader criminal justice system. The Open Society Justice Initiative has also recently published a Template Legal Brief on Early Access to Legal Assistance, to assist legal practitioners to litigate issues of early access to legal assistance for people accused or suspected of crimes.

The Legal Aid Reformers’ Network (LARN) is an international information-sharing network of organizations and individuals working to promote the right to legal aid and effective defence. LARN builds on the experience of the Open Society Justice Initiative, which has been promoting legal aid reforms and created an informal network of public defenders and legal aid managers across Europe and globally. The Network provides a virtual platform for policymakers and legal practitioners to exchange experiences and collaborate in further developing newly created legal aid systems. LARN is open to any interested organizations and individuals.

Anyone can send materials and news to be posted on the website.  If there is any news in your country or any information, developments or upcoming events about legal aid or criminal defence, please email: larn.network@gmail.com.

LARN’s website is organized with the support of the Human Rights Grants and Governance Program of the Open Society Institute and is managed in collaboration with the Open Society Justice Initiative.