Resource Library

On February 7, 2019, Ministers and high-level representatives from countries and international organisations convened in The Hague to come to a shared understanding of the opportunities to strengthen support and commitments for access to justice ahead of the High Level Political Forum (HLPF) and the SDG Summit in 2019. Participants explored strategies for the achievement…

Legal empowerment is concerned with strengthening the capacity of all people to exercise their rights.4 It’s about grassroots justice — ensuring that law is not confined to books or courtrooms, but is available and meaningful to ordinary people. People and organisations are working towards this goal worldwide, in ways ranging from expanding provision of free…

This resource comes from The Journal of Development Studies, 2019 Vol. 55, No. 3, 333–347. Legal empowerment has become widely accepted in development policy circles as an approach to addressing poverty and exclusion. At the same time, it has received relatively little attention from political scientists and sociologists working on overlapping and closely related topics –…

This resource is from the The Journal of Development Studies, 2019 Vol. 55, No. 3, 348–365. In this paper I issue a call for a primary focus on expanding and strengthening alternative, community-based justice systems, as a strategy for securing the full benefits of legal agency to indigenous and other culturally distinct groups. I do so…

The Annual Report documents UN Women’s work to foster women’s empowerment and gender equality around the world. It highlights some of the organization’s initiatives during the year and provides summary financial statements, a list of new programmes and projects, and contact information. The time is now! At a historic time when women’s activism is galvanized around…

From the Zambia National Legal Aid Policy 2018, which has progressive policies around accessing justice, including the formal recognition of community paralegals: The Government of the Republic of Zambia has committed itself to enhancing equal access to justice particularly for the poor and vulnerable people, as part of its efforts to observe the rule of…

This policy brief offers recommendations for policymakers, donors, and multilateral institutions on how to finance and protect the grassroots justice defenders who provide essential legal support to communities. In every region of the world, these champions of legal empowerment—who mostly hail from civil society—are helping people to know, use, and shape the law. Grassroots justice…

For the first time, we quantify and pinpoint the yearly need for fair solutions. In this report, we estimate that each year, 1 billion people face a new and serious conflict. They experience violence, stress, loss of work and income or damage to key relationships. Data show that right now, people rely on litigation in…

This policy brief aims to highlight the plight of Kenyans who face difficulties in getting identity cards due to their ethnicity. It sheds light on how the discretionary and discriminatory processes they endure delay the issuance of their ID cards and further demonstrates how these delays endanger the wellbeing of the applicants and their families. The…

The focus of this toolkit is two-fold: to outline framing principles and strategies that support the long-term movement of hearts and minds, and apply them toward shorter-term victories. The guidance included here is rooted in a large body of opinion and media research; in established communications techniques; and in the shared experience of hundreds of…

This report presents an overview of the South Rupununi District Council (SRDC) Monitoring Programme and provides a case study of one particular site that the Monitoring Programme has been targeting – Marudi Mountain. The report begins with background information regarding the Monitoring Programme and how it operates. It continues by providing a summary of the…

Joseph Phelan of Organizing Upgrade sat down with Purvi Shah and Chuck Elsesser of the Community Justice Project based at Florida Legal Services in Miami in early April to discuss the role of lawyers in grassroots organizing, social movements, and building another world. The Community Justice Project was founded in 2008 to provide legal support…

This resource is from the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change, Volume 15, 2011, pg. 25-66. Public interest lawyers seeking justice for marginalized groups cannot succeed by working alone. Meaningful social change occurs when marginalized and dispersed peoples unite and organize to take power into their own hands. Such groups benefit greatly…

Legal empowerment has the potential to enhance sector development work by building the capacity of project beneficiaries to participate in and benefit from development projects. But, to harness its power, development specialists need to understand the ins and outs of this field. This document is designed to be used as a practical guide to undertaking…

Amidst increasing concerns about threats to their forests, wetlands and way of life, the Wapichan People of Guyana (South America) have set up their own ground-breaking system to defend their human rights and monitor their ancestral lands against harmful development. Community information has been collected using a grassroots land use monitoring arrangement that involves community…