As a group of legal specialists who work with communities, NATURAL JUSTICE is constantly exposed to the gap that exists between international and national law on human rights and the environment and the daily reality for indigenous peoples and local communities (ILCs) at the local level.
Indigenous people and local communities are being granted important rights under international human rights instruments such as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the International Labour Organization Declaration 169 and under international environmental laws such as the Rio Conventions (CBD, UNFCCC and UNCCD). States are bound to uphold the standards set in the human rights instruments and to implement the provisions of those laws. Whilst many countries are working at the national level to enact laws in line with their international obligations, ILCs face a variety of challenges in using the law to affirm their rights to self-determination and drive their endogenous development plans.
There are many reasons for this, including a range of reasons often cited in literature on access to justice such as information asymmetries, local corruption, misgivings about the legal system and very practical barriers such as distance to centres of learning. NATURAL JUSTICE identifies a further reason why ILCs find it hard to engage with legal structures, namely, they are founded on principles that are at odds with their values and customary laws. Interaction with the law, in this case, becomes intractable.
ILCs’ cultures are mega-diverse, yet share certain commonalities. Many ILCs living traditional lifestyles that have conserved ecosystems share a conception of the self not as a unit separate from the worldover which they have proprietary rights, but rather an understanding of theself as integrated with the land and embedded within an ethical relationship.TK then is not a value-neutral piece of information but is interconnected witha way of knowing that is a result of an interaction between ILCs and the land that is rooted in cultural practices and spiritual values and enshrined in customary laws. Notably, it is this bio-cultural relationship, not their ownership over TK, that has contributed to centuries of in situ conservation of biological diversity.
ILCs have consistently highlighted their integral relationships with the environment at various international meetings and haveworked to integrate their views into international laws and other ILC declarations. These declarations speak of a way of being in the world that sees the self as embedded within a network of relationships with land, water, plants, and animals, expressed through culture and integrated into customary laws. The results of this intimate relationship can be understood as forming a landscape in which humans have had to adapt to the land, and in doing so have also adapted the land. They emphasize that the bio-cultural foundations of their traditional knowledge cannot be seen as separate from the land and animals, their culture, and spiritual beliefs, or outside the framework oftheir customary laws - in other words, each community’s endemic way of life.
NATURAL JUSTICE is working to assist ILCs to engage with legal frameworks that are founded on principles that are either at odds with their world views, or in some cases, contradict them. The next pages under "Africa" and "Asia" detail the communities with which we are working and explains how we are assisting them to assert their values in a changing legal landscape.
For up-to-date information about our work, please visit our blog: http://natural-justice.blogspot.com/ and our Flickr photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/naturaljustice/sets/
