Over 400,000 acres of land in Myanmar, that was taken by the military, government, and private companies between the 1980s and early 2000s, has reportedly been released since 2013. However, this does not mean that the land has been returned to the farmers whose livelihoods were displaced by these land acquisitions. Namati offers this brief to emphasize the need for the government to also put in place simple, transparent mechanisms to ensure that land and justice is restored to those farmers and communities who were dispossessed of their livelihoods without due process or compensation.
Note: this brief is in Burmese. An English language version is available here.
Over 400,000 acres of land taken by the military, government, and private companies between the 1980s and early 2000s has reportedly been released since 2013. However, this does not mean that the land has been returned to the farmers whose livelihoods were displaced by these land acquisitions. Namati offers this brief to emphasize the need for the government to also put in place simple, transparent mechanisms to ensure that land and justice is restored to those farmers and communities who were dispossessed of their livelihoods without due process.
Note: A Burmese version of the brief can be found here.
We are pleased to announce that Namati and the Legal Empowerment Network are among the recipients of the 2016 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.
According to the Skoll Foundation, the award is presented to leaders or organizations that are disrupting the status quo, driving large-scale “equilibrium” change, and are poised to create even greater impact on the world.
This is a generous recognition of the legal empowerment movement. We hope to use this opportunity to raise the profile of legal empowerment with a wider community of allies and supporters.
To further assist us with this goal, the Skoll team has made this wonderful five-minute video about the work of grassroots legal advocates.
Namati submitted this briefing paper to assist the government of Myanmar and other interested parties in efforts to ensure the implementation of the 2013 recommendations of Parliament’s Farmland Investigation Commission. The commission is tasked with scrutinizing land grab cases and to promote justice for Myanmar’s citizens whose land was taken without due process or compensation.
According to the Secretary General of the Farmland Investigation Commission, as of June 2015, approximately 30,000 cases have been submitted to the Commission, of which about 20,000 have been heard. Of those, a small number of cases (882 or 4%) have been found justified to receive compensation. Many of these are collective cases, and according to the 2015 report, the Commission has returned about 335,000 acres of urban and farmland to benefit 33,608 families.
Namati’s own experience suggests that the number of cases justified to receive compensation or return of land should be much higher. We further recommend actions the government can take to help streamline the return and compensation of grabbed land and improve the likelihood that outcomes are fair and equitable. This briefing draws on Namati’s experience using a network of community paralegals trained to use administrative procedures to resolve land grab cases in Ayeyarwaddy, Southern Shan, Sagaing, Magwe, and Bago between 2013 and 2015.
It was an honor to give the closing plenary speech at the World Justice Forum in Warsaw, Poland. I met amazing lawyers and judges there, including the Polish Minister of Justice Adam Bodnar, who is helping the country recover from a multi-year assault on the judiciary, and Mehmet Tank, who was one of thousands of judges imprisoned in Turkey for doing their jobs. The grit and courage of people like Bodnar and Tank are truly inspiring. But to protect democracy in this moment, we cannot leave law to lawyers and judges alone. We need mass legal empowerment. In my brief remarks, I described what that can look like.
– Vivek Maru, CEO, Namati
З юридичними та фізичними особами, які поділяють місію, статутні цілі та завдання ГО “Інститут фінансів та права”у сфері:
1) публічних фінансів – http://www.institutefl.org/konsultatsiji.htm;
2) надрокористування та ПЕК – http://www.institutefl.org/nadra.htm;
3) земельних відносин – http://www.institutefl.org/obih.htm;
4) державної реєстрації речових прав – http://www.institutefl.org/obih.htm,
Інститут фінансів та права співдіє:
1) або шляхом входження у громадські спілки та інші громадські об’єднання, наприклад, ГС “Полтавська громада разом”,
2) або шляхом входження у коаліції, наприклад,
– Громадська рада при Полтавській обласній раді (http://grom-obl-rada.blogspot.com/),
– громадське партнерство “За доброчесні державні закупівлі” (www.integrity.pp.ua).
– відкрита громадська платформа “Нова Полтава” (http://nova.poltava.ua/).
Across the globe, the “development experience” of communities varies depending on their socioeconomic and political backgrounds. As a result of advancing developmental projects, a few communities are invariably made to pay a disproportionate share of the environmental costs in the form of exposure to toxic waste, loss of livelihood, and restrictions on mobility or access to common resources. This injustice, more than often not, is an outcome of active noncompliance and violation of environmental regulations by the projects.
The Centre for Policy Research–Namati Environmental Justice Program is an effort towards closing this environment regulation enforcement gap. We have created a network of community-based paralegals, called as enviro-legal coordinators (ELCs), who work with affected communities using an evidence-based legal approach. As a part of this approach, the ELCs combine their understanding of the law, negotiation and mediation skills, and understanding of local contexts to assist affected communities in the use of the law to resolve environmental conflicts. They help the communities to understand relevant laws and environmental regulations and support them in engaging with institutions using these laws for better enforcement of regulatory compliance on the ground. This approach also develops a collaborative space for institutions and citizens to craft practical and sustainable remedies for the impacts that communities experience.
This publication is a compendium of a few cases undertaken by the CPR–Namati Program’s ELCs working across the coastal belt in Gujarat and North Karnataka. These case stories capture the process of our work and illustrate the systematic, evidence-based legal approach followed by the ELCs along with the affected coastal community members to resolve conflicts arising from noncompliance or improper implementation of environmental regulations.
These case stories are divided into three major thematic sections as follows:
Section 1: Establishment and Activation of Gujarat’s District-Level Coastal Committees (DLCCs) as per Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Notification, 2011: This section includes case studies from Gujarat, where ELCs worked towards establishing or activating District-Level Coastal Committees, an institution set up for better implementation of CRZ regulations and protection of rights of traditional coastal communities.
Section 2: Securing Housing Clearances for Coastal Communities under Coastal Zone Regulation Notification, 2011 in North Karnataka: This section includes case studies from Uttara Kannada, a district in North Karnataka, where ELCs supported members of coastal communities in securing housing clearances under the coastal protection law.
Section 3: Legal Empowerment in Practice: Two Case Stories: This section has two case stories from our field sites in Gujarat that illustrate the process and outcomes of legal empowerment though our work with communities.
The ecologically unique but fragile Mundra region in the western Indian state of Gujarat has seen ferocious industrial expansion over the last decade and a half. A range of multipurpose ports, coal-handling facilities and thermal power plants have been granted approval under various environment regulations and built.
This report from Namati, produced in partnership with Mundra Hitrakshak Manch (Forum for the Protection of Rights in Mundra), MASS and Ujjas Mahila Sangathan, shows that the enforcement of these regulations has been woefully inadequate.
A blog post by Namati that provides context and background to the inclusion of justice and legal empowerment being included in the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.
A visual representation of the five stages of the community land protection process developed by Namati and partners.
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This resource is from Namati’s Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide, which can be accessed here. To view all the individual chapters and supporting resources, refer to the interactive online version of the Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide here.