The Legal Empowerment Project
PBI UK are pleased to launch a new programme of legal empowerment, protection and resilience-building activities and resources for grassroots activists and communities working on environmental rights issues: the Legal Empowerment Project
This new initiative combines the expertise and legal networks of Lawyers Against Poverty (LAP), Simmons & Simmons, The Alliance for Lawyers at Risk, and Action4Justice with PBI UK’s human rights defenders focus, knowledge and network.
The Legal Empowerment Project bridges the gap between grassroots human, environmental and climate justice movements and the international legal community, and builds coordinated and multidisciplinary approaches to global environmental issues.
This new international legal network takes stronger, more diverse and multidisciplinary approaches to the prevention of business and State-led human and environmental rights abuses, rooted in community knowledge and vision, and in collaboration with those with the best access to legal opportunities and international mechanisms.
We are seeking need legal experts to share their knowledge of best practice in relation to business and human rights. By identifying gaps in knowledge and expertise, you will contribute to a system of tailored support that enables human rights, environmental and climate justice defenders to protect and enforce their rights and access justice on the front line.
Launch event
On Monday, 25 October 2021, we launched the project at the London office of Simmons & Simmons. Allies and partners joined together to learn more about how threats posed by climate change can be seen as a human rights issue, and how evolving environmental legal precedents globally are expanding the scope of environmental law to include our collective duty to protect planet earth and to hold governments and corporations to account.
During our panel discussion, we explored the role that the legal community can play in exploring innovative solutions across jurisdictions jointly with grassroots environmental defenders, how international lawyers can get involved in actively widening access to international and regional legal protection frameworks, and how the rapid transfer of legal knowledge and strategies should be seen as a must in light of the increasing urgency of the climate crisis.
We were also pleased to show ‘In Defence of Our Lands’, a new documentary by Manu Valcarce that explores the work of land, climate and environmental rights defenders in their own words.
The film will be screening at the COP26 Climate Coalition People’s Summit, and is available on YouTube below
