Access to Justice

International law recognises indigenous peoples’ and forest peoples’ collective and individual rights, however, there is a huge implementation gap between this recognition and respect for these rights in practice. We support indigenous peoples' and forest peoples’ access to justice through facilitating their strategic use a wide range of judicial and non-judicial mechanisms when their collective rights are violated or when their human rights defenders are criminalised, threatened, or killed.

Context

The systematic violation of indigenous peoples’ and forest peoples’ land, territory and resource rights across a range of sectors has been widely documented, as has the alarming level of criminalisation and killing of their human rights defenders. Several landmark and important decisions upholding indigenous peoples’ rights have been taken by national and regional courts and by international human rights bodies, however, implementation of these decisions has been slow or non-existent.

Aims

A core aim of this work is to ensure legal systems and other grievance mechanisms are effective, accessible, and just at the local, national, and international levels, and that indigenous peoples and forest peoples have the tools and skills to demand that their rights are respected in these fora. We also aim to ensure that decisions upholding indigenous peoples’ and forest peoples’ rights are fully implemented and establish useful legal precedents for future cases and help drive legal reform.

Our Work

We support indigenous peoples and forest peoples to seek access to justice through the strategic use of a wide range of judicial and non-judicial mechanisms at national, regional, and international levels whenever their internationally recognized rights are violated or their land defenders are criminalized, threatened, attacked, or killed.

This range of legal and quasi-legal mechanisms includes national courts and ombudspersons, regional commissions and courts, international human rights treaty bodies and special rapporteurs, OECD National Contact Points, complaint mechanisms of international financial institutions, and grievance mechanisms of industry and multistakeholder bodies. We assist indigenous peoples and forest peoples to engage these mechanisms 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 also support them in proactively demanding the implementation of decisions upholding their rights.

Our close partnership with indigenous peoples and forest peoples, and expertise such as GIS mapping, provides an understanding of local contexts, threats, and opportunities. This provides the evidence base to advance cases against states, companies, investors, and other non-state actors, and realise precedents aligned with indigenous peoples and forest peoples’ needs that help build momentum towards legal reform.

We contribute to the development of accountability and redress mechanisms in both public and private institutions and work to ensure judicial and non-judicial mechanisms are aligned with international human rights standards. We do this through advocacy for national and international law and policy reform and engagement with lawyers and the judiciary to increase awareness and understanding of the rights of indigenous peoples and of forest peoples.

Where indigenous peoples or forest peoples land defenders are at risk of imminent human rights violations or are criminalised for their work, we engage the Strategic Legal Response Centre to provide rapid response legal support to enable their protection and defence.