Strategic Legal Response Centre
The Strategic Legal Response Centre (SLRC) is one of FPP’s priority initiatives and was established in 2021 to magnify FPP’s legal support to indigenous peoples and forest peoples, and to help fulfil the untapped potential of strategic legal intervention for the realisation of their rights. It improves the agility and speed of FPP’s response in urgent situations, while also strengthening the broader legal community of practice working on indigenous peoples’ and forest peoples’ rights.
The availability of urgent and sustained legal support across the broader legal community of practice is nowhere near commensurate with the scale and urgency of the needs of indigenous peoples and forest peoples. This need is growing due to shrinking civic spaces, increasing violence, intensified competition for land, and rapid expansion of large-scale agribusiness, extractive industries, infrastructure and fortress conservation (including increasingly non-rights compliant nature market initiatives), and is compounded by non-implementation of landmark human rights legal decisions by States and their failure to enact law and policy reforms.
Aims
The SLRC aims to improve the availability and quality of legal support to secure and protect indigenous peoples and forest peoples’ rights and livelihoods and to ensure that companies and governments are answerable for actions that violate national or international law and threaten their rights, and by assisting indigenous peoples and forest peoples to build their legal capacity and share experiences and strategies.
Given the scale of the challenges that indigenous peoples and forest peoples face, no single institution can fill this gap between international law’s recognition of indigenous peoples’ and forest peoples’ rights and the widespread violation of those rights in practice.
In an effort to close this gap, the SLRC brings together partners from academia, civil society and private practice, and indigenous and forest peoples’ organisations and representatives in a networked, collaborative approach, building upon FPP’s 30 years’ experience in strategic litigation and legal capacity building. These collaborations help support the development of a community of legal practice around indigenous peoples and forest peoples’ rights at international, regional and local levels.
In addition to supporting strategic litigation and legal reform, by facilitating knowledge exchanges, workshops and trainings, the Centre helps indigenous peoples and forest peoples build their capacity to use legal tools and to develop and share legal strategies and experiences and to learn from and support each other to be able to better protect their rights and their forests.
The provision of rapid-response legal support for urgent threats to collective or individual rights, or to advance their rights in crucial moments, is a key element of the SLRC. This is particularly the case given the alarming levels of criminalisation, harassment, violence and killings of indigenous rights defenders, and the fact that windows of opportunity occasionally arise where immediate action can result in significant momentum for law and policy reform.
To realise its aims, the SLRC consists of four mutually reinforcing pillars:
- Support for strategic test cases to create important and innovative legal precedents in key jurisdictions. These cases arise from long-term engagement with communities and span the lifecycle of the legal action, from initial strategizing and evidence gathering, to litigation and appeal where relevant, and implementation of decisions or the pursuit of alternative avenues for redress;
- Rapid response legal support to respond to urgent threats or key opportunities to advance rights. This includes litigation and other strategies to provide urgent protection to indigenous peoples or forest peoples’ representatives who are at risk as a result of their advocacy work. It also includes capitalising on legal reform opportunities that need an immediate response;
- Grow a stronger community of practice. This includes convening land rights dialogues involving legal practitioners, academics and partners and generating guidance materials. It also involves facilitating people-to-people exchanges, both within and across countries and regions, to permit sharing of experiences and expertise and collective problem solving;
- Training, internships and/or fellowships together with local capacity building for indigenous peoples and forest peoples and their representatives. This also includes developing strategic partnerships, including with academic institutions, to provide opportunities for members of indigenous peoples and forest peoples, young lawyers or law students to gain experience and build expertise in this area of legal work which in turn helps grow the community of practice.
