Natural Justice: Lawyers for Communities and the Environment

Description

Natural Justice is a non-profit organisation of lawyers and legal experts working on human rights and environmental law in Africa.

Founded in 2007 in Cape Town by Harry Jonas and Sanjay Kabir Bavikatte, it works to enhance the collective rights of communities and protect the relationships that indigenous peoples and local communities have with nature. Through legal empowerment, research, policy influencing and litigation, it supports communities to know, use and shape the law. Its work rests on three pillars: securing rights to lands, resources and knowledge; defending rights against environmental and social impacts; and standing with communities.

The organisation developed the community protocols approach, a tool that helps communities set out their rights under customary, national and international law, and it played a role in the recognition of such protocols in the 2010 Nagoya Protocol. It works on land and natural resource governance, extractive and infrastructure impacts, traditional knowledge, conservation and biodiversity, and community responses to the climate crisis.

Natural Justice is headquartered in Cape Town, South Africa, with hubs in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dakar, Senegal, and additional staff in Madagascar, Botswana and Guinea. It also works across other African countries on a project basis.