Legal and Human Rights

The past 30 years have seen major advances in international human right law on the rights of indigenous peoples and forest peoples. This is reflected in the affirmation of the rights of indigenous peoples to self-determination, lands territories and resources, free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), and to maintain their own legal systems, in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It is also reflected in the jurisprudence of international and regional human rights bodies addressing the rights of indigenous peoples and of other forest peoples.

This progress is yet to be properly reflected in national jurisdictions and other bodies of international law, such as trade, investment and environmental law. Legal frameworks remain inadequate, and where good laws exist there are often major implementation gaps. Economic activities of external actors continue to result in serious violations of the rights of indigenous peoples and forest peoples’ to own, use and control their lands, territories and resources and pose grave threats to the forests they depend on for their physical and cultural survival. In addition, in many places their representatives are frequently criminalised, threatened, attacked or even killed when they attempt to defend the rights of their peoples and communities.

The aim of the Legal and Human Rights Programme is to ensure that indigenous peoples’ and forest peoples’ voices shape national and international law and practice and to ensure respect for their rights to self-determination, land, territory and resources, to livelihoods, non-discrimination, and to FPIC. We also seek to ensure that indigenous peoples and forest peoples have access to justice at local, national, regional and international levels, and can realize culturally and gender appropriate justice and remedies for historical and on-going violations of their individual and collective rights. In so doing, we seek to hold state and business actors in extractive, agri-business and related supply chains, infrastructure or conservation (including nature markets) sectors to account for human rights violations.

We work directly with indigenous peoples’ and forest peoples’ representatives, communities, organisations and networks to bring their priorities, experiences and solutions directly into national and international law and policy making circles.  We provide legal and technical assistance to support indigenous peoples and forest peoples to shape and use national and international law, and to assert their own customary laws, to realise their right to self-determination, gain control over their lands, territories and resources, and tackle the racial discrimination that perpetuates the denial of their collective rights. Our work seeks to involve and ensure justice and the realisation of rights for all members of indigenous peoples and forest peoples, including women, men, and people of all gender identities, ages, and abilities. More information on how we embed Gender Justice across our work can be found on our Gender Justice and Gender Programme pages.

We also assist indigenous peoples and forest peoples to obtain justice for violations of their territorial rights and the rights of their human rights defenders. Our understanding of local contexts, threats and opportunities, combined with complementary areas of expertise (such as GIS mapping), helps provide the evidence base to advance cases against states, companies, investors and other non-state actors, and realize legal precedents that build momentum towards law and policy reform.

Grounded in long-term relationships with indigenous peoples and forest peoples, and working in close collaboration with their representatives and organisations, we

• advocate for people-led, research-driven, human rights-based law and policy reform at national and international levels across a range of sectors, including conservation, extractive industries, agribusiness and related supply chains, and infrastructure. We seek to ensure that legal regimes spanning environmental, trade and investment law and global law and policy spaces related to biodiversity and climate mitigation, and in emerging areas of clean energy transition and nature markets, are aligned with international human rights standards on respect for indigenous peoples’ and forest peoples’ rights.
• facilitate the strategic use of a wide range of judicial and non-judicial mechanisms at national, regional and international levels to ensure access to justice and rapid response whenever land and self-governance rights are violated or indigenous peoples’ or forest peoples’ land defenders are criminalized, threatened, attacked or killed. We also support indigenous peoples and forest peoples to proactively demand implementation of legal decisions upholding their rights. We amplify this support through our Strategic Legal Response Centre in collaboration with our country teams, and networks of local lawyers and partners.
• empower indigenous peoples and forest peoples to demand respect for their rights and their own legal systems and laws, including their right to regulate activities within their own territories in accordance with their self-determined plans and visions for the future. We support indigenous peoples’ and forest peoples’ development of their own regulatory instruments, such as FPIC protocols and laws, as well as their initiatives to realise gender justice. We also assist them to strengthen their legal capacity and develop legal strategies rooted in their visions and directed by them and facilitate people-to-people exchanges to share those strategies and to develop mutually supportive actions.