Fighting for land, environmental, and climate justice is risky. Global Witness annually reminds us of the staggering number of people who are killed for defending their land—over 2,100 since 2012. And lethality is only the tip of the iceberg, one of a multitude of violent tactics that people face when they speak up for their community.
Energy to address risks to environmental rights defenders is shifting, but not quickly enough
The last few years have seen encouraging steps to respond through global and regional policy. National governments have started to make specific commitments to protect environmental rights defenders, deeming it necessary to address the climate crisis. The Escazu agreement in Latin America has explicit requirements for the state protection of environmental rights defenders. Just this month, the UNFCCC Supervisory Body for Article 6.4 and the UN Secretary General’s Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals showed how global bodies can incorporate the protection of environmental rights defenders directly into climate policy. More broadly, hundreds of organizations have pooled their efforts to end retaliation against environmental defenders through the ALLIED network.
Within communities, however, the risk is still great—as are the myriad land and environmental injustices. It takes a long time for these policy promises to translate to changes in culture and practice amid conflicts. Too often, the interim solution of global actors is to remove a defender from the situation, protecting the individual but leaving the underlying problem unresolved.
Key strategies to find pathways to justice in risky places already exist in legal empowerment
What do we do while we wait for momentum to build and for policy to translate into practice? We can draw hope from thoughtful, strategic examples of grassroots legal empowerment. Throughout the world, legal empowerment advocates—people helping individuals and groups know, use, and shape the law with the support of community paralegals—are assisting communities in registering their land, stopping corporate pollution of their water, and negotiating fair land use deals even in the most difficult places.
Last year, we examined the experiences of environmental defenders who were able to continue their work in repressed environments, using tenets of legal empowerment to find pathways to justice in ways that reduce their risk. Here’s what we saw:
Community organizing is a fundamental step in using legal empowerment to address climate, land, and environmental injustice. We found it is also a tool used to navigate risks when civic space is quickly closing and shifting. When formal gathering spaces close, paralegals often use informal community organizing spaces to educate the community about the law, promote awareness of legal issues, and discuss options to pursue remedies. Some practitioners even open less threatening spaces, such as soup kitchens, to allow the community free access to a gathering space without attracting suspicion. The practitioners also explained that their organized community response allows them to distribute risk across different members of the community and to create layers of protection.
Unlike some legal responses, legal empowerment allows the justice seeker the flexibility to consider multiple pathways to obtain a remedy. Consequently, when some pathways become more risky because of security, they can still consider alternatives. Sometimes, these shifts are subtle, like changing who submits paperwork to a government office to lower suspicion. In one case, when men were under increased suspicion, they trained the women in the community to engage with local administrators. Other times, changing the pathway to remedy means adjusting when to gather and share evidence. For example, depending on the context, it can be more or less safe to share evidence of violations broadly.
Grassroots justice advocates frequently build relationships with individuals in the community who can provide increased protection when there is a crisis. Relationships with religious leaders, traditional leaders, lawyers, and the police can help a paralegal take quick action when an individual is threatened or arrested. In addition to responding to the immediate security concern, being able to provide a quick response builds the credibility of the paralegal within the community. These alliances can also include those outside the community, such as embassy officials and international networks.
Though they are usually keen to address land and environmental justice issues, paralegals working in constricted civic spaces also organize communities to understand and practice using their rights in response to criminalization. Often, there are not enough lawyers available to respond to mass arrests, so preparation by community paralegals can be helpful in addressing the scale of need during a crackdown.
How do we super-charge support for this subtle, effective protection alternative?
While grassroots justice advocates are continuing to seek remedies in tricky places, global actors can do more to support them. The primary shift that can support this type of innovative risk response is to provide flexible, unrestricted funding directly to grassroots justice advocates, whether through philanthropy or from pooled private sector funds that facilitate independent legal and technical support. Flexible funding allows the practitioners to shift their plans as pathways become riskier; it also allows them to invest in security equipment that may not clearly fit into a project-driven budget. Openness to different types of reporting can allow grassroots justice advocates to make decisions about what information is safest for them to reveal without concerns about financial security.
Secondly, those who influence global frameworks, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), can do more to incorporate the security of environmental rights defenders into these frameworks. For example, the security of environmental rights defenders is integral to the access to justice encompassed by Sustainable Development Goal 16, and progress on that issue should be included in all SDG 16 reporting. Within the UNFCCC, the language protecting defenders from Article 6.4 Supervisory Body and the Secretary General’s Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals should be mirrored throughout climate policy frameworks and resourced during their implementation.
While the actions against environmental defenders are shocking, there are significant steps the rights community can take now to support grassroots actors moving forward.
This blog is part of a series in partnership with Namati. See other blogs in this series here.