Building a Legal Case and Requesting Information
In some situations, making a complaint to a court, regional or international mechanism may assist you in addressing the injustice you, or the community you work with, are facing. If you do pursue a court case, you will need the support of lawyers but they will rely on you and the affected community to help gather evidence and provide proof of the injustice or abuse you are facing. These sessions will explore the different types or evidence and the strategies and tools that can be used to build your court case.
Session 1: Building your Evidence
These sessions will help attendees to identify the type of evidence they need to collect, and how to access it. Witness evidence alone may not be enough to prove your case, and so it is useful to look for documents that can help determine issues and build your evidence. This may include expert testimonies and advisory reports, corporate documents, and publicly accessible information.
Session 2: Expert Reports & Access to Information
This session will present methodologies for incorporating expert reports into cases, across sectors and issues. When building your case, you may wish to bring in expert witnesses who can offer their opinions on controversial points and critically assess details. For instance, corporate pollution is a prevalent issue across industries with impacts that span generations. Although we may be able to see the impact on our environment and health, it can be difficult to prove what exactly is happening without monitoring, measuring, and analysing pollutants and their possible impacts on public and environmental health.
Session 3: Documenting Evidence from Public and Private Bodies: an Introduction
This presentation and Q+A will cover introduce the process of obtaining corporate evidence through freedom of information requests, public bodies, private entities, and licenses. We will introduce the tools and strategies that can be used to seek out the evidence, and how to access support from civil society and the international pro bono legal community.
Session 4: An Introduction to Disclosure
In this session, specialists from legal systems with and without disclosure will discuss the process and best practice. Some countries require each party to make relevant documents and evidence available to each other as part of the litigation process. This process of ‘putting the cards on the table’ at an early stage is known as disclosure, and can be a useful tool to obtain testimony and documents. But this is not a universal process – in some countries there is no obligation upon a party to produce documents - parties will have to fund and research companies on their own.
Session 5: Building a Case for Environmental Degradation
In this interactive session, legal specialist will draw out the links between international human rights and international environmental law, outline the obligations on companies and identify international initiatives that make these links effectively in case building.
This session will look at different conventions and environmental treaties to explore what is the right to a healthy environment? The session will evaluate different legislative instruments and what steps grassroots activists can take when there is an identified breach by a company.