In an op ed in The Guardian, Namati CEO Vivek Maru argues that, while there has been significant progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals, we are grievously far from what justice demands. Citing the five principles of the Justice 2015 campaign, Maru calls for a comprehensive development framework with justice at its heart.
In a world where billions live outside the protection of the law, Namati is dedicated to putting the law in people’s hands. We’re building a global movement of grassroots legal advocates who work with communities to advance justice. These advocates are fighting on the front lines to ensure that people can protect their land, access essential services, and take part in the decisions that govern their lives.
Law is supposed to be a sacred thread that ties us together, and protects each one of us.
But for billions of people around the world the law is broken. It’s an abstraction, or worse, a threat, but not something we can use to exercise our basic rights.
Namati is building a global movement of grassroots advocates who give people the power to understand, use, and shape the law. These advocates form a dynamic, creative frontline that can squeeze justice out of even broken systems.
Legal empowerment advocates treat their clients as empowered citizens rather than victims requiring an expert service. Instead of “I will solve this problem for you,” our message is: “We will solve this together, and you will grow stronger in the process.”
In the past four years, Namati and its partners have worked with over 50,000 clients to take on some of the greatest challenges of our times: protecting community lands, enforcing environmental law, and securing basic rights to healthcare and citizenship.
We track data on every case, and together with our clients we use that information to advocate for systemic changes, like better policies for land governance in Liberia, environmental regulation in India, and healthcare delivery in Mozambique.
Namati convenes the Global Legal Empowerment Network, which is made up of over 900 groups from all over the world. We are learning from one another and working together to bring justice everywhere.
From 2014 until 2016, the Community Self Reliance Centre implemented an adaption of Namati’s legal empowerment approach to community land protection in four communities in Nepal, with the goal of piloting a strategy for successfully addressing challenges of landlessness in the country.
In early 2018, Namati undertook an assessment of the work for the purpose of understanding if and how the program made lasting impacts within the participating communities.
This assessment report is a detailed account of their findings.
This resource is a joint submission by the Council of Minorities and Namati for Universal Periodic Review (UPR) about the treatment of Urdu-speaking Biharis in Bangladesh.
Namati and Council of Minorities have partnered since 2013 to implement a community-based paralegal program focused on citizenship and related rights of the Urdu-speaking community in Bangladesh. Paralegals are recruited from and active in dozens of Urdu-speaking camps in 7 cities across the country empowering camp residents to acquire and use citizenship-related documents.
In this Burmese language report Namati and Landesa highlight the pressing need of Myanmar’s rural population – and recommend potential solutions – as the Myanmar government embarks on wide-reaching land policy reform.
Myanmar is undergoing a major transition, opening space for significant change for the first time in decades. Secure land tenure for smallholder farmers and rural communities is essential in a heavily agrarian nation like Myanmar, where millions in the rural population – nearly 70% of the country – depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Despite some updates to the legal framework, such as the 2012 Farmland Law and Vacant, Fallow, and Virgin Land Law, millions of Myanmar farmers remain vulnerable with insecure land tenure due to a complex and opaque set of land laws, unresolved historical land grievances, and widespread landlessness.
The common aim of Namati and Landesa is to support the development of a protective, pro-poor legal framework, that will empower farmers to use the law, make informed decisions about their land, and maintain secure land tenure – ultimately leading to poverty alleviation for poor, rural women and men.
Since the start of its Myanmar program in 2013, Namati and local partner Civil and Political Rights Campaign Group (CPRCG) have deployed 30 community-based paralegals in seven states and divisions to help farmers secure land tenure under Myanmar law. In two years, the paralegals worked alongside farming families and large groups of farmers to seek solutions to over 2500 land issues.
The Namati-CPRCG paralegals also rigorously track every case to build an understanding of how farmers experience interactions with land-related laws and administrative systems. With paralegals across Myanmar including central lowlands and ethnic states, the geographic breadth of the program allows for meaningful comparisons of implementation and government decision- making across regions.
Landesa, a US-based nonprofit, has worked on issues of secure land rights for poor, rural women and men, including landless families, in over 50 countries since 1967, including comparative fieldwork and policy review in a dozen Asian countries (including five that have successfully carried out major land tenure reforms: Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, China, and Vietnam). In addition to this extensive regional experience, Landesa has carried out fieldwork in multiple areas of rural Myanmar.
The discussion and recommendations below are informed by the complementary perspectives and experience of Landesa and Namati – international and comparative examples of land reform and best practices, grassroots data from the experiences of Myanmar farmers, and additional fieldwork conducted by both organizations throughout the country.
Esta brochura, elaborada no âmbito da parceria entre a Namati e a FDC, tem como objectivo divulgar os direitos das trabalhadoras de sexo e dos homens que fazem sexo com homens em face da actuação da polícia, no atendimento, nas buscas e na detenção; as violações comuns a que este grupo é sujeito e os meios de acesso à justiça.
____
This brochure, produced as part of the partnership between Namati and the FDC, aims to disseminate the rights of sex workers and men who have sex with men in the face of police action, service, search and arrest; the common violations to which this group is subjected and the means of access to justice.
The International Land Coalition frequently receives requests of solidarity from members in Africa, Asia and Latin America for or on behalf of Human Rights Defenders working on land rights, especially activists. This infonote is meant to support their invaluable work with information on international protection mechanisms and organizations addressing human rights violations related to land. The guide is also available in French and Spanish by visiting http://www.landcoalition.org/publications/international-mechanisms-protecting-human-rights-defenders-risk-their-work-land-rights
In 2013, Duah village in Liberia faced a serious challenge. Private company Lion Growth Ltd. was interested in the acquisition of Duah customary land. Duah’s local leaders struck a deal with the company without consulting the community. As a result, Duah community mobilised and rallied around their new mechanisms for inclusive, participatory land governance and, with the support of Namati and the Sustainable Development Institute (SDI), held their leaders accountable. The community convinced their elders to cancel the deal, and this victory protected the Duah’s customary land and livelihoods and legitimised the community’s new participatory, people-focused land governance system.
For additional land resources, visit the International Land Coalition’s Database of Good Practices at: http://www.landcoalition.org/en/good-practices
This paper was prepared for the 3rd UNITAR-Yale Conference on Environmental Governance and Democracy, 5-7 September 2014, in New Haven, USA.
Abstract: Around the world, communities face increasing threats to their lands and ecosystems from large-scale land acquisitions and expropriation for industrial agriculture, mining, deforestation and infrastructure investments. Many of these activities dispossess communities from their lands and lead to environmental degradation, human rights violations, loss of livelihoods, and inequity. While action is needed at national and international levels, local communities and civil society need more immediate and practical tools to protect their lands, natural resources, and ecosystems. Namati is an international organization dedicated to strengthening people’s capacity to exercise and defend their rights in practical ways. Namati specializes in developing innovative ways to empower and mobilize civil society organizations, communities, and vulnerable groups to protect their rights to land, natural resources and a healthy environment.
In this paper, we provide an overview of Namati’s approaches, tools, and research findings. We focus on Namati’s Community Land Protection Program, which since 2009 has supported over 80 communities in Liberia, Uganda, and Mozambique to document, protect, and manage community lands and natural resources. This work has generated unparalleled comparative and cross-national data on the effectiveness of legal empowerment strategies for protecting land and resource rights. We also draw examples from Namati’s work on land rights and environmental justice in Sierra Leone, Myanmar, and India. We offer specific and practical recommendations for policy and practice, focusing on strategies for effective use of paralegals and legal aid to strengthen, defend, and enforce land and environmental rights.
The government of Myanmar, under two separate administrations, has been working to resolve land grabs since 2012. Namati, partners, and community paralegals they deploy have been working on land grab cases since 2013. Paralegals collect granular data on every case they support and Namati collects, stores, and analyses this data. This data shows that the rate at which land grab cases are being resolved has been slowing since a high-point in the third quarter of 2015. This slowdown is widely acknowledged by senior officials and officials working in the system.
This policy brief addresses three questions:
1. At what rate have land grab cases been resolved over the last six years?
2. Why is the resolution rate of land grab cases slowing down?
3. What can the government and civil society do to reverse these troubling trends?
This policy brief will explore these questions using case data, the caseworks experience of community paralegals, official information released by the governments, and the experience of CSO representatives involved in the mechanism.
This resource is also available in English.