UN Resolution on Legal Aid

Via namati.org

The United Nations Commission for Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice has unanimously adopted a resolution for the groundbreaking UN Principles and Guidelines on Access to Legal Aid in Criminal Justice Systems. The principles and guidelines are the first international instrument on legal aid.

According to analysis by Namati, some of the most significant components of the resolution are:

• Prompt access to legal aid at all stages of the criminal justice process and a right to be informed about a right to legal aid and other procedural safeguards before any questioning and deprivation of liberty; 
• The involvement of a diversity of legal aid providers including lawyers, CSOs, university legal clinicians and paralegals; and 
• The development of a nationwide legal aid system that is sufficiently staffed and resourced to ensure effective and quality legal aid services delivery. 

Read more of Namati’s analysis on the principles and guidelines here.

Using UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights

The Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO), the Centre for Human Rights and Environment (CEDHA) and Cividep-India have released a guide for civil society organisations entitled ‘How to use the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in company research and advocacy.’ The guide details the contents of the Guiding Principles and offers concrete guidance on how civil society organisations can  use them to ensure businesses are respecting human rights. 

From the description, “these Guiding Principles can be utilised to address the responsibility of business to respect human rights and thereby support local communities, workers and other rights holders to ensure fulfilment of their human rights. The guide provides a method for CSOs to use the Guiding Principles in company research and advocacy, and helps them to hold companies accountable for their corporate responsibility to respect internationally recognised human rights.” 

The guide can be found online here or downloaded here. The guide is the second of a series of guides produced by SOMO. The first guide, on Multi Stakeholder Initiatives, can be accessed here.

First UN Forum on Business and Human Rights

The first United Nations Forum on Business and Human Rights took place in Geneva from 3-5 December 2012, hosting around one thousand participants from around the world to discuss how governments and businesses are addressing the impacts of business activities on human rights. The Forum was prepared under the guidance of the Working Group on Human Rights and Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises and was mandated to discuss trends and challenges in the implementation of the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and to promote dialogue and cooperation between actors, including identification of good practices. The Chairperson for the first Forum was Professor John Ruggie, former Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Business and Human Rights. 

The programme included break out sessions under the banner of “Taking Stock – 1 1/2 years after the endorsement of the Guiding Principles”, reviewing experiences under each of the three Guiding Principles’ pillars. The second day was spent considering the challenges in the implementation of the state duty to protect and business responsibility to respect human rights, as well as the role of civil society and the UN system, and the challenges for business affecting Indigenous peoples and ways forward. Side events were held from 3 December and included “Challenges and Opportunities for the Extractives Industry in integrating human rights into operations”, “The role of the legal profession in promoting implementation of the Guiding Principles”, “Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Industries” and “Impact and remedy of mining on Latin American Indigenous Women”. 

The Forum was attended by participants from 85 countries, including state delegations, business enterprises such as the mining, oil and energy industries and international financial institutions, as well as civil society organisations. A full list of participants can be found here. The full programme for the Forum can be found here. For more information, please see the Forum on Business and Human Rights website here. Natural Justice's recent submission to the Working Group on Human Rights and Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises can be found here. 

Fellowship Opportunity at IACHR

Natural Justice strongly encourages partners to consider applying for a recently opened fellowship on Indigenous peoples' rights with the Executive Secretariat of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organisation of American States (OAS). The IACHR has been a leading institution for the advancement of Indigenous peoples' rights, and fellows will support the Rapporteurship on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The position has been opened to provide an opportunity for young lawyers from OAS Member States to understand and apply the mechanisms of protection of the inter-American system of human rights in the area of Indigenous peoples’ rights. 

Successful applicants must be citizens of an OAS member state, be proficient in Spanish, have received a law degree after January 2005, and have a demonstrable professional interest in the legal field of human rights, specifically in the area of Indigenous peoples’ rights. Applicants must present a paper of up to five pages, not edited by another person, on a human rights issue of interest to the candidate in the area of indigenous peoples’ rights. 

Find out more about the position here.

Blog Post on Conservation and Human Rights

From its origins in seeking to protect disappearing wildlife at the behest of big-game hunters, conservation has evolved unpredictably and substantively over the past century. With a firm conviction that the practice of conservation, to paraphrase Dr Martin Luther King Jr, is long but ‘bending toward justice’, Dr Kent Redford recently traced the developments in conservation practices and the increasing emphasis on the need to incorporate human rights discourses and practices into conservation in a blog post for Just Conservation.

According to Dr Redford, “change also came about at the turn of the last century because of the issue of justice. The arc of conservation was bending with the realization that our moral argument for the value of conserving biodiversity was seriously flawed if we ourselves were acting immorally towards people. Seeking one justice did not justify abrogating another. So conservation entered the period of accommodation, of self-examination, and of change. It was clear that we needed to seriously consider how our actions, taken in pursuit of conservation goals, affected the rights of the people impacted by those actions.” 

Find the full blog post here.

Natural Justice Joins GNHRE

Natural Justice has recently joined the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment (GNHRE). The network, which describes itself as a network for the creation of change, is an “internet-based project aim[ing] to build a dedicated portal for the exchange of scholarship, thinking and insights drawn from community-embedded experience and praxis at the interface between human rights and the environment.” 

The aim of the network is “to build a global network of researchers, policy-makers, opinion-formers and community activists whose diversity forges new conversations and relationships. We are building a network for the creation of change – and it starts with the transformation of thinking.” As part of this mission, the network produces the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment.

Read more about the GNHRE here. Information on the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment can be found here. Find Natural Justice’s profile on the GNHRE website here.