Aims
Making international law work in the field
The main objective of this project is to train and connect human and environmental rights defenders with legal experts around the world to develop and embed legal strategies to enforce and protect human rights and our planet and tackle the lack of implementation of important legal protections.
This will be achieved through interactive and tailored workshops on legal skills and best practice which will enable defenders to respond strategically to breaches of international standards.
Our immediate aims are to:
Increase the legal knowledge of human rights, environmental and climate justice movements, to help identify obligations and duties which they can legally protect and enforce, particularly in their local context.
Enhance their ability to protect themselves (and the communities they represent) against physical, legal and wider threats.
Consolidate the resources, tools and legal databases available to create a centralised library of best practice to drive well-informed legal interventions with more likelihood of success.
Deepen the understanding of international legal frameworks, the duties of state and non-state actors and appropriate redress mechanisms, and their capacity to instigate and coordinate legal strategies (including case building, monitoring, legal advocacy and analysis of legal processes.)
Increase resilience and strengthen connections with the international legal community through peer-to-peer support, collaborative mentoring partnerships, and longer term pro bono assistance.
Connect hundreds of human and environmental rights defenders from Latin America, Africa and Asia with an international network of lawyers committed to Lawyers Against Poverty’s mission of using the skills and resources within the legal community to increase access to justice around the world.
If we do not know to demand them, there is absolutely no way we will be granted the privileges guaranteed to us.
Steve Kinuthia