Most of Asia’s 3.5 million refugees and asylum seekers face exclusion and structural barriers on a daily basis due to a lack of legal status. They experience arbitrary detention, gender-based violence, economic exploitation, and limited access to justice. Asylum Access works to end these harms by using legal empowerment strategies like individual representation, group education, and community organizing to do what other humanitarian and development approaches alone cannot: challenge the root causes of exclusion that leave refugees at risk. Asylum Access has already gained important policy victories. In Thailand, they led civil society efforts to advocate for a 2019 law that protects refugees from detention and deportation.

Through this project, Asylum Access, in collaboration with Chulalongkorn University and Refugees & Asylum seekers Information Centre will test various strategies that seek to improve access to legal status, work rights, justice, and other forms of protection. The goal is to identify and improve the impact of a variety of refugee legal empowerment approaches and build on existing refugee-led initiatives and best practices across different contexts. This work will support refugees to know, use and ultimately, shape laws, policies and practices.  

In Malawi, arbitrary arrests by the police target the so-called “undesirable elements of society”, including sex workers, vendors, children who live and work on the streets, persons who beg, and persons with disabilities. These individuals are frequently arrested and charged on various grounds, such as being ‘idle and disorderly’, ‘soliciting for an immoral purpose’, being a ‘rogue’ or ‘vagabond’, loitering, and breach of the peace. Use of arbitrary arrests to target vulnerable and poor communities is a violation of human rights. 

Through this project, the Southern Africa Litigation Centre (SALC) and the Centre for Human Rights Education, Advice and Assistance (CHREAA) are exploring two main questions: (1) How can legal empowerment approaches help translate grassroots efforts to address police abuse in Malawi into improvements in broader law, policies, and institutional practice? (2) How do legal empowerment approaches combine legal strategies with organizing and other forms of collective action to address impunity for police abuse? The goal is to empower the community to know when their rights are being violated, to document and report such abuses, and to demand that abuses be addressed by public institutions. They hope to create a system in which the police are fair and friendly to the community, and the community has confidence that the police will protect them. 

In East Africa, paralegalism and access to justice are evolving fields. Strategies like legal advice by refugee-trained paralegals, human rights education, and community mobilizing by civil society organizations have helped to empower local groups and communities, including minorities, to secure their rights. Kituo Cha Sheria is the longest and most experienced legal aid and empowerment organization in Kenya. But despite the existence of legal aid programs, there is still a substantial gap in access to justice for many people, particularly poor and marginalized groups.  

Through this project, Kituo Cha Sheria will partner with the Legal Aid Forum in Rwanda, Zambia’s Paralegal Alliance Network, and the African Centre of Excellence for Access to Justice to assess the efficacy of legal empowerment programs, specifically focusing on the paralegal approach and digital justice in Kenya, Rwanda, and Zambia. This includes the use of technology within the justice sector during the COVID-19 pandemic and the effects of formalizing paralegals through recognition, training, accreditation, and financing. The other aspect of the research involves evaluating the impact of legal empowerment programming in Kenya in improving access to justice for communities. The project will analyze how programs are transforming the lives of communities, particularly marginalized and vulnerable ones, and how they are bringing about structural change to the justice system. It will identify gaps and recommend new strategies for fostering transformative systemic change in order to improve the efficacy of legal empowerment programs in overcoming exclusion, inequality, and injustice. The ultimate goal is to not only inspire change in attitudes and practices among public, state, and non-state actors, but also to inform future innovation and strategy on legal empowerment across East Africa.

For the past decade, foreign investments in land and agriculture (for mining, logging, infrastructure, agro-industries, and conservation purposes) have increased in Africa. The huge scale of land acquisitions across the region has led to numerous injustices and conflicts. Currently, the main approaches to investment-related rights violations in the field of land and environmental justice in Uganda and Cameroon are reactive. Legal empowerment is usually provided after lives have been lost, property destroyed, local waters and soils polluted, and communities devastated. Reactive legal empowerment has a limited chance of restoring the damage caused. Building on learning from past initiatives in Cameroon and Uganda, this project proposes a shift. It aims to preventively address conflicts before violations occur.

Through this project, the Centre pour l’Environnement et le Développement in Cameroon, the Land and Equity Movement in Uganda, and the International Institute for Environment and Development in the UK will study how preventative legal empowerment support and conflict resolution strategies can help rural communities in Cameroon and Uganda ensure that their land rights are respected, that their communities do not suffer the negative impacts of land-based investments (in particular increased displacement, injustice, environmental degradation, impoverishment, and human rights abuses), and that they can play a more proactive role in democratic, inclusive governance of land and land-based investments. Rapid response and early warning hotlines will allow communities to seek legal empowerment assistance as soon as they feel their rights are at risk. They will map conflict hotspots to help the community identify areas facing potential land/resource conflicts and provide preventative conflict resolution support. Finally, they will monitor companies’ compliance with legal and contractual obligations. This work will develop innovative approaches to strengthen the ability of rural people, particularly women and other vulnerable groups, to protect their rights in the face of land-based investments.

In Nairobi, Kenya and Kitwe, Zambia, long-standing land tenure questions have hindered urban planning and the provision of affordable housing and services in informal settlements. Insecure land tenure results in inequitable land distribution. In Kenya, land is concentrated in the hands of the elite few who possess the tools for resource capture, so public land is largely inaccessible to the poor. Zambia faces unsustainable rural-urban migration. Poor access to services creates acute risks of insecurity for women and girls and denies them their dignity. Over the last decade, there have been efforts to stem the deep inequality and exclusion in Nairobi’s informal settlements. Akiba Mashinani Trust, in collaboration with Muungano wa Wanavijiji Alliance, Strathmore University, and the University of Nairobi, have succeeded in getting the Mukuru settlement in Nairobi declared a special planning area (SPA)–a transformational model to spur redevelopment through collaboration between local government and the community.

Now, together with People’s Process on Housing and Poverty in Zambia, this project brings together grassroots movements, local authorities, universities, and civil society organizations to co-produce knowledge needed to achieve inclusive and equitable change in informal settlements. It seeks to understand the root causes blocking access to inclusive basic services and infrastructure, as well as the particular challenges that hinder the participation of women and other vulnerable groups in decision-making. The research will identify options for overcoming land tenure impediments, document lessons from the implementation of Mukuru SPA, generate new data and based on that, develop an integrated local area plan for the Ipusukilo settlement in Kitwe, Zambia. Urban poor communities will play a crucial role in planning and data collection to ensure the research is responsive to their needs.

The Matanza Riachuelo River Basin is one of Argentina’s most polluted waterways. Four to five million people live in the basin region, with 10% of them living in informal settlements. Asociación Civil por la Igualdad y la Justicia (ACIJ) has been working with communities in the basin for over 14 years and has supported groundbreaking court cases defending communities’ rights. In 2008, a critical Supreme Court case ruled that residents have a right to a healthy environment and mandated the cleanup and redevelopment of the river basin. More recently, other judicial rulings have recognized the communities’ right to participate in decision-making. These cases and resulting changes to governance of the river basin have the potential to set a precedent for future cases of urban redevelopment and resettlement for communities in environmental hazard areas.

ACIJ is working with residents of two informal settlements–Villa Inflamable and Villa 21-24–to help realize the commitments of the court rulings. This project allows ACIJ to continue this work, with an ultimate goal of empowering residents to realize their social, environmental, and economic rights and ask for greater participation in decision-making processes. The research involves studying (1) the most effective legal empowerment strategies to address rights violations; (2) how interrelated social, economic, and cultural rights can be used to advance environmental justice; (3) how to navigate the tensions between community demands and environmental restoration; (4) the roles played by the different levels and branches of the state; and (5) how legal empowerment approaches can be targeted to meet the needs of women and LGBTQ+ groups and increase their inclusion in public participation processes. ACIJ’s work centers knowledge sharing between communities. Bringing together communities and creating a space for them to exchange experiences will help residents demand that governing institutions provide more integrated, standardized, and equitable responses along the basin.

Listen to ACIJ’s story of community participation on episode 1 of our podcast, A Common Pot. Click here.