Rights on Paper, Protection in Practice: Who Makes the Law Usable?
About the session
The legal architecture for climate justice, Indigenous rights, land protection, and human rights has rarely been stronger on paper.
International law establishes significant obligations for states on climate change. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has been in place since 2007. National and international legal frameworks protect land, natural resources, and fundamental human rights.
And yet communities still lose their land. Climate obligations go unenforced. Indigenous legal systems are bypassed. People facing dispossession can find themselves without meaningful legal recourse. Environmental defenders face litigation intended to exhaust or silence them. Communities negotiate with powerful corporations over natural resources without access to the legal expertise or infrastructure required to do so on equal terms.
The problem is not simply what the law says.
It is who can actually use it.
Legal empowerment requires infrastructure: lawyers with the right expertise and relationships, community-level legal literacy, sustainable funding for public-interest litigation, recognition of Indigenous peoples’ own legal systems alongside formal frameworks, and enforcement mechanisms capable of functioning when governments or corporations fail to comply.
Much of that infrastructure remains underbuilt, underfinanced, or invisible to the funders and policymakers who talk about rights without asking who has the power to enforce them.
The International Court of Justice’s 2025 Advisory Opinion on states’ obligations in respect of climate change creates an important new opportunity to ask this question. Clarifying legal obligations is consequential. But those obligations become meaningful on the ground only when people, organizations, and institutions have the capacity to use the law.
The same is true of every framework intended to protect communities.
This session will examine what it takes to close the distance between legal rights and legal protection. How can community legal empowerment be built and sustained at scale? What does it mean to recognize Indigenous peoples’ own legal systems as legitimate frameworks governing land, resources, and relationships rather than obstacles to formal processes? How can international climate law be translated into action at national and community levels? And what should funders, governments, financial institutions, and the legal community invest in if they want rights to become genuinely usable?
Discussion Group Leaders
- Isobel Butler is Director at Protimos, advancing legal empowerment and sustainable legal infrastructure that help African communities protect their land and natural resource rights.
- Laura Mai is Professor of Climate Law and Society at University of Bern, advancing research on climate law, justice, finance, and governance across public, private, and philanthropic institutions.
What to expect
A practical conversation moving between international law and what happens when a community actually needs to defend its land, resources, or rights.
Participants will draw on experience from environmental litigation in Latin America, community legal empowerment in Africa, Indigenous rights, international climate law, and land protection in East and Southern Africa.
Rather than debating whether stronger legal frameworks are needed, the conversation will focus on the infrastructure required to make existing rights meaningful: who interprets them, who can invoke them, who pays for enforcement, and what happens when powerful actors refuse to comply.
Who this is for
This session is for lawyers, legal advocates, human rights practitioners, climate and environmental law specialists, funders of legal empowerment and public-interest litigation, Indigenous rights advocates, community land rights organizations, policymakers working on climate obligations, and anyone who has watched legal rights fail to translate into protection for the communities they were designed to serve.
What you will get out of it
- A clearer understanding of what produces the gap between legal rights and meaningful protection
- Perspectives on how the 2025 ICJ Advisory Opinion can be used to advance climate accountability in practice
- Insight into recognizing Indigenous peoples’ own legal systems alongside formal legal frameworks
- Practical approaches to building sustainable legal infrastructure for communities protecting land, natural resources, and human rights
- A sharper picture of what funders, governments, financial institutions, and legal practitioners need to invest in if communities are to turn rights on paper into protection in practice