Movement Lawyering in Times of Rising Authoritarianism
In-person Symposium
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
July 3-5, 2024
AN ESSENTIAL CONVERSATION FOR OUR TIMES
On July 3-5, 2024, the Global Network of Movement Lawyers at Movement Law Lab, in partnership with Labá - direito, espaço & política (of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and Terra de Direitos hosted the Symposium “Movement Lawyering in times of Rising Authoritarianism” at PUC-Rio, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Movement lawyers from around the world, researchers, activists and students gathered to reflect on how movement lawyers have used (or pushed against) the law to support social movements in the face of repressive or authoritarian regimes and collectively discuss new ways of confronting compounding global crises.
The recent pandemic, rising authoritarianism, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, accelerating climate disasters, and migration crisis all demonstrate how conditions for movement lawyers working on the frontlines alongside movements and impacted communities have drastically changed. And yet, the difficulties of the moment have prevented us from doing the vital task of revisiting the analytical and practical lenses through which we do our work. The symposium was an attempt to start that conversation.
All around the world, “movement lawyers” (or whatever term might be used locally to describe lawyers who have a critical approach to using the law in service of social movements and organized communities) are deploying creative tactics on the ground that act as examples of how the law can be used counter-hegemonically to confront the systemic oppression inherent in our present global political economy. We organized a discussion about different modes of movement lawyering practice with a grounding in the present conjunctural moment by surfacing stories about how movement lawyers, operating from an analysis of our global political economy, innovate within the law in order to structurally change the system. Given the erosion of democratic norms in a rising number of countries around the world and the increasingly visible cracks in our [structurally flawed] international legal order, we discussed how movement lawyers, together with social movements, are meeting this challenging moment by employing legal tactics in defense of democracy, pluralism, land sovereignty and self-determination.
Through sharing local experiences from diverse contexts, the Symposium highlighted how the global neoliberal and authoritarian turn shows up in the human experience. The process of interchanging stories from different countries and continents reinforced the need to build global solidarity in a world that is extremely individualized, despite being increasingly connected. We discussed how our actions, whether as lawyers or activists, should center the impacts of the present context of compounding crises - from the housing crisis to climate collapse - on bodies and territories. After all, every crisis is a lived crisis.
“Authoritarianism not only represses us, it depresses us.”
Camila Gomes, Coordinator of International Advocacy and Litigation, Terra de Direitos, Brazil
Program
Wednesday, July 3:
Reception: Framing the conversation: An introduction to movement lawyering and law and political economy + welcome reception.
Thursday, July 4:
Opening: Opening remarks by host organizations and universities.
Spotlight: Conversation with Mônica Benício (Councilwoman of Rio de Janeiro and Marielle Franco's widow) & Ana Paula de Oliveira (Founder of Mães de Manguinhos).
Session 1: Roundtable on the rise of authoritarianism under a hegemonic neoliberal order: movement lawyering with resistance struggles in the Global South.
Session 2: Land, housing and climate struggles as a pathway to new forms of democracy.
Session 3: The future of international law: the limits of today’s international legal order and potential future horizons.
Friday, July 5:
Local Visit: Visit with social movements based in Rio de Janeiro.
Introduction: Opening & Reception - Framing the conversation: An Introduction to the discourse on movement lawyering, law, and political economy
The Global Network of Movement Lawyers and host organizations opened the symposium, welcoming an international delegation of movement lawyers, guest speakers and local social movement leaders. The speakers emphasized the importance of exchanging and building infrastructure like the Network to cultivate a collective reflection that uses local struggles and demands as a starting point to understand the global root causes of crisis in the context of global and neoliberal capitalism (imperialism, colonialism, fascism, extractivism, indebtedness, militarism). We also discussed how movement lawyers leverage international sites of promotion and protection of rights like the UN (often palatial, elitist and far from the suffering of vulnerable groups) to elevate grassroots analyses and experiences to places where these ideas do not usually appear.
We noted the importance of situating our analysis in the lived experiences of the people most impacted by crisis and oppressive systems. We kicked off the Symposium with a series of principles, namely, that we must:
Compare concrete lived realities of the present moment. Evaluate the present conjunctural moment by understanding how authoritarianism and neoliberalism appear in diverse situated contexts.
Highlight how social movements have shaped the practice of movement lawyering. Recognize the ways in which social movements such as the MST and others have taught the legal field the politics of memory, reparation and dignity based on mass popular mobilization efforts.
Understand the changing rights discourse as democracy erodes. Interpret the role of the struggle for rights within the framework of the more general question of “How might we devise the best strategies for social emancipation?” - especially as democracy erodes globally and produces a crisis of legitimacy for various democratic institutions.
Center the question of power. Even as we recognize the limits of the law and the ways in which it represents the interests of the dominant class, we must still extract as much as possible for social movements while also laying the groundwork for a new system to emerge, based on the principles of non-domination, social, economic, racial and gender justice, ecological harmony and non-extractivism and true democracy.
Recognize law as but one tool among many. Movement lawyers must use multiple tactics and ways of innovating inside and outside the law, on the streets, and in the media to truly change the culture in which we are operating.
See our struggles as interlinked and interdependent. As crises compound and accelerate, there is no single struggle in any one location that will trigger the kind of structural change we are aiming for. That's why we need to connect with each other, understand patterns and the power structures pushing against us, and create bridges between the struggles on the ground.
Understand how the Right has captured the movement tactics and the law. Discuss law as a necessary terrain of struggle for movements as we witness the capture of legal tactics and institutions and a simultaneous co-optation of progressive tactics (street mobilizations, grassroots organizing, etc) by the Right and far Right.
Recognize the institutionalization of repression. Violence against defenders, hate speech and anti-rights practices cannot be erased overnight because they have been integrated into the fabric of democratic institutions by authoritarian leaders. We need to produce long-term solutions.
Acknowledge increasingly challenging conditions for both our local work and the possibility for global solidarity building. The compounding and multiple crises are experienced by people of flesh and blood in different territories, in environments that are increasingly hostile to solidarity networks and the use of public spaces for speech, dissent, and expression of progressive and reparative visions.
We organized the Symposium in Brazil to honor and acknowledge the long intellectual and practical discourse that has been developing around “advocacia popular,” “abogacía popular” (or “movement lawyering”) in South America and, specifically, Brazil. We proposed a “pedagogy of listening” to unite in networks of embodied solidarity. As Camila Gomes noted, authoritarianism not only seeks to repress us, it also seeks to isolate and depress us. We therefore seek to rally together in joy and defiance, finding strength in our common visions for justice and dignity.
Speakers
Camila Gomes: Coordinator of International Advocacy and Litigation, Terra de Direitos, Brazil (read bio)
Felipe Mesel: Global Programs Manager at Movement Law Lab, Argentina (read bio)
Fernanda Ferreira Pradal: Professor of Criminology and Human Rights, PUC-Rio, Brazil (read bio)
Júlia Ávila Franzoni: Professor of Law, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and Coordinator of Labá - direito, espaço & política, Brazil (read bio)
Meena Jagannath: Director of Global Programs at Movement Law Lab, Coordinator of the Global Network of Movement Lawyers, USA (read bio)
Virgínia Totti Guimarães: Professor of Law at PUC-Rio, with research in socio-environmental rights, Brazil (read bio)
“We as movement lawyers start from the idea that law is a field of argumentation, and we use what we have at hand to support social struggles.”
Jomary Ortegón. President of Colectivo de Abogados José Alvear Restrepo (CAJAR), Colombia (read bio)
Spotlight: Conversation with Mônica Benício (Councilwoman of Rio de Janeiro and Marielle Franco's widow) & Ana Paula de Oliveira (Founder of Mães de Manguinhos).
This first conversation sought to situate our guests in the context of the city of Rio de Janeiro and its struggles for justice, given the necessity of thinking about capitalism and authoritarianism by examining their direct impact on specific bodies and territories.
Bethania Assy opened the conversation by critiquing the difficulty of producing justice and realizing rights from within the law, since law schools tend to be so disconnected from the places where law is being produced and the places where the real disputes over law are taking place. That is to say, the law that is taught is drastically different from law as it is developed and experienced. To confront this “epistemicide,” she proposed an epistemological shift to rethink the central question of “Where is knowledge being produced?” - necessarily triggering a dispute over where we derive concepts of resistance, justice, citizenship and empowerment.
Mônica Benício began by acknowledging the Symposium as a historic event, because there have been few times when she has seen this auditorium with such a diverse representation and an initial table that brings together two women from favelas to hold this debate at PUC-Rio, one of the most elitist universities in Brazil. She emphasized Rio de Janeiro as a city that exemplifies the violent construction of the state, just as Brazilian democracy which was built with the blood of native peoples and Black people. She marked her struggle with a quote from Conceição Evaristo, who once told her: “Go and tell them that what moves you is the fear that things will never change, the fear that there is no justice to repair what outrages you.”
"Today, the fight for justice for Marielle is configured for me as the fight for the police to be investigated and for those responsible to be held accountable – something that the Brazilian State owes not only to Marielle's family and to Brazilian society as a whole, but also, and especially, to the fight for a society where Marielles flourish and are valued, and have, through the state and society itself, the necessary conditions to exist. Because the little power that Marielle could have as a councilwoman - because Brazil respects few things and one of them is the status of power - was not enough to protect the body that Brazil considers disposable: the Black, female, LGBT and favela body. And that banner I put there speaks precisely to this in a sentence that Marielle published a few days before she was murdered: “How many more have to die for this war to end?” – Monica Benicio
She went on to say that when we talk about state violence, it is essential to make a structural class and race distinction. Favela residents are educated in a policy that teaches that beauty doesn't belong to them and that violence is commonplace. Marielle's murder is instructive for Brazil in many areas of the human rights debate, one of which is the relationship between the police, politics and the militia that today structures the state of Rio de Janeiro. The state creates the problem for the militia to sell the solution.
Ana Paula de Oliveira, founder of Mães de Manguinhos, an organization of mothers who lost their children to state violence, connected her fight for justice for her 19-year-old son Johnatha, killed by police in 2014, with the fight for justice for Marielle.
“I found in this struggle a way to continue exercising my motherhood, to continue taking care of my son. Because that's what happens when our children are murdered. We don't have the right to mourn and we need to go out in defense of that child. Because for the police it's not enough just to kill the body, you have to take everything away, the dignity of the person, you have to criminalize these bodies in order to somehow give legitimacy to these murders. Unfortunately, we live in a racist, prejudiced society that kills, imprisons and disappears black bodies.” – Ana Paula de Oliveira.
On the day of Johnatha's murder, Marielle was one of the first people to contact Ana Paula, and then she joined in the protests in Manguinhos: “When I received the news of Marielle's murder, it was as if I had lost someone who symbolized a mother. And if 10 years ago she took me in like a mother, today we are fighting for another daughter who was taken from us." By way of conclusion, she offered an analysis of the contradictions inherent in demanding solutions from the State and from a racist and violent justice system. She noted that at the end of the day, the struggle is against impunity so that cases like Jonatha's can never be repeated: “we must organize ourselves because the other side is very well organized!”
The fierceness of these two women leaders confirmed that Marielle lives in the vital energy of those who have had the opportunity to share life and struggle side by side with her. At the end the audience broke out into chants of: Marielle Presente! Johnatha Presente!
Speakers
Ana Paula de Oliveira: Founder of Mães de Manguinhos, Brazil (read bio)
Mônica Benício: Urbanist, feminist, councilwoman in Rio de Janeiro, widow of Marielle Franco, Brazil (read bio)
Moderator
Bethania Assy: Philosophy of Law Professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), and at State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), Brazil (read bio)
“I found in this struggle a way to continue exercising my motherhood, to continue taking care of my son. Because that's what happens when our children are murdered. We don't have the right to mourn and we need to go out in defense of that child. Because for the police it's not enough just to kill the body, you have to take everything away, the dignity of the person, you have to criminalize these bodies in order to somehow give legitimacy to these murders. Unfortunately, we live in a racist, prejudiced society that kills, imprisons and disappears black bodies.”
Ana Paula de Oliveira: Founder of Mães de Manguinhos, Brazil. Read bio.
Session 1: Roundtable on the rise of authoritarianism under a hegemonic neoliberal order: movement lawyering with resistance struggles in the Global South
Luciana Pivato kicked off the discussion by discussing how although ex-Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was defeated in the elections, “Bolsonarism” has not been defeated. In this context, we need to think about “advocacia popular” (movement lawyering) as having these key elements:
Developing a critical view of the law in order to overcome it and start dreaming of another kind of law.
Developing the collective construction of legal paths to resolve the demands of social movements, moving away from a client-lawyer logic.
Adhering to a principle of non-violation of human rights, because it is illogical to defend a movement today and then practice law in a liberal realm tomorrow in a way that would violate the rights of indigenous peoples, women, etc.
Developing advocacy strategies that incorporate various tactics and instruments: litigation, conflict mediation, policy advocacy and human rights education. In the context of advancing authoritarianism, we must evaluate the efficacy of these tools.
Luciana pointed out that in the first phase of their struggle with movements, their dispute was to transform the law, because at that time, their analysis of the law was that it was not adequate to respond to people’s desires and needs. But now, 20 years later, people are begging for a minimal respect for the rule of law, for observing a minimum of democratic rules and principles. She added that it is not enough to talk to people on the Left who agree with us, but we must also talk to people from more liberal and capitalist sectors who are not fascist to convince them to join us in the fight against fascism.
Eleonora Mesquita Ceia added that oftentimes, in order to conceptualize authoritarianism, we start from a model of liberal democracy that consists of: political decentralization; an independent judiciary; periodic elections; fundamental political freedoms (protest, association, party creation, expression, freedom of the press); institutions of governance (participation of the people via representation); and economic freedom. Economic freedom, in the form of the free market, goes hand in hand with this model of democracy. She noted that this approach could be a trap and suggested that we should develop an alternative model to liberal democracy made up of two main components: fundamental political freedoms and social justice (deconcentration of income, deconcentration of land and popular representation in institutions). She then defined “Bolsonarism” as a reactionary movement, with popular support and the support of the market, and suggested that movement lawyering should make use of an institutional route as well, allying itself with political parties, which would also require training in human rights and political education.
Lamine Benghazi spoke about the situation in Tunisia from the 2011 revolution to the present. After the revolution, political parties were incorporated, and there was an institutional, cultural, ethical and even sexual revolution. However, the material conditions of life for everyday people did not improve, but worsened instead. As a result, an authoritarian-style government under Kais Said has emerged. Under its rule, it drastically amended the constitution, dismantled the state institutions and removed the independent authorities that emerged from the 2014 constitution produced after the revolution. Even as we might critique liberal democracy, the experience in Tunisia demonstrates how difficult it is to build movements when even liberal democratic protections go away. At this point, the primary problem beyond government authoritarianism in Tunisia is that there is also little political participation of the people, which raises the question: Is it possible to build a democracy without democrats? Is it possible to build a democracy without intermediaries such as political parties? What we see emerging in Tunisia is a hatred of democracy and the celebration of arrests and political persecution. The tension to contend with is how to build a democratic program that not only expands rights but can also respond to the material needs of people.
Pepe Julian Onziema commented on the repression and criminalization of the LGBTIQ+ population in Uganda. The spread of HIV in the 1980s coincided with President Yoweri Museveni’s rise to power and the opening of the country's doors to receive support from the West. One of the groups that came to offer this support were evangelicals, mainly from the United States. They have been driving homophobia in Uganda (and elsewhere in Africa), culminating in its recently-resurrected and passed anti-homosexuality law, which includes such draconian measures as the death penalty for acts of homosexuality. Uganda has thus emerged as “ground zero” for homophobia, but it is just part of a global movement pushed by a network of private actors led by the reactionary Christian Right. Networks of global solidarity are therefore necessary to map who is behind the global anti-LGBTQI+ movement and work collectively to combat it.
“My organization was closed down in August 2022 and it's strange because the government refused to register us in the first place. You then have to ask yourself ‘What are they closing?’ But incredibly, in the last two years we feel we've done more grassroots organizing and movement building than we've done in the last 20 years. I say this because we have created several different mechanisms and ways of working. For example, we created a periodic report to map the violence in which we show the cases of evictions, rape, extortion, blackmail and other violations that we document in order to take the government to court.”
– Pepe Julian Onziema.
Diego Morales addressed four big changes that President Javier Milei’s new government is leading in Argentina: 1) The dismantling of social policies and the brutal adjustment of the public budget, with a special focus on eliminating funding for gender issues, policies that support social reproduction, and the rights of indigenous and agricultural communities. 2) The stigmatization of social organizations supporting communities and working class people, as well as repression and criminalization of opposition and protests. The entire network of state agencies and social organizations that makes it possible to implement policies on the ground has been eliminated in Argentina. This process of stigmatization has gone hand in hand with eliminating social policies (i.e. providing food to community kitchens). 3) The erosion of memory, truth and justice policies, which in Argentina were very important after the last dictatorship. 4) Creating a new kind of foreign policy, in which Argentina ceased to participate actively in Mercosur, declined to be part of the BRICS bloc, and the president doesn't follow traditional state practice of meeting with official state representatives, but rather meets with representatives of the local extreme right (e.g., instead of meeting with Brazilian President Lula, Milei met with ex-President Bolsonaro). This scenario creates a challenge about how to even deploy the law to contest these different levels of state intervention. The major normative changes made under Milei have made judicial oversight more difficult because it is difficult to identify the proper forums to challenge the changes, determine which courts are competent to review certain state actions and determine under what legal theory an action can be challenged.
Speakers
Diego Morales: Litigation Director, Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS), Argentina (read bio)
Eleonora Mesquita Ceia: Professor of Law, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil (read bio)
Luciana Pivato: Movement lawyer and Human Rights Defenders, Brazil (read bio)
Lamine Benghazi: Head of the Justice and Rule of Law program at Avocats Sans Frontières, Tunisia (read bio)
Pepe Julian Onziema: Ugandan LGBT rights & human rights defender, and Director of Programs at the Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) (read bio)
Moderator
Camila Gomes: Coordinator of International Advocacy and Litigation, Terra de Direitos, Brazil (read bio)
Session 2: Land, housing and climate struggles as a pathway to new forms of democracy.
Felipe Mesel introduced the session recognizing the importance of grounding the discussion on movement lawyering in certain issues: the tensions between rentier uses, linked to the concentration of income through land, and solidarity uses, which understand space as a space of affections; and of the process of material construction of rights (often outside the state) - i.e., spaces for the production of meanings that are different from the meanings and imaginations that capital wants to impose on land. For that purpose we try to think about how rights are activated by social movements and how we can create a discussion inside and outside the law to move towards more emancipatory horizons linked to land use. When we consider authoritarianism and neoliberalism as they relate to the territory, we see that the policing and violent control of territories is used for the consolidation of neoliberalism in spatial terms. In this way, we see that in the Global South, authoritarian political projects use the law in two ways: a) in a colonial manner, which seeks to restore historical power relations on the ground, in which the law is only an instrument of the ruling class; b) a destructive character, which seeks to dismantle all laws that try to protect historically marginalized sectors of society and the environment. Finally, we also want to analyze the role of law in the construction of identities, and how it cooperates in cementing the relationships that exist between identity and territory (understanding that several conflicts occurring in the world, including the conflict in Gaza, are linked to this articulation between appropriation of territory and identity).
Luana Varejão talked about the “Zero Eviction” Campaign in Brazil, which emerged in July 2020 in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic when the WHO recommended “Stay at home” policies. The biggest achievement came in July 2021, with the first suspension of evictions as a result of ADPF 828. The campaign started monitoring to provide data on the number of families threatened with eviction. According to the latest update we have from the campaign, from May 2024, 1.5 million families are threatened with eviction in Brazil. Within the institutional and public policy crystallizations generated by this struggle (which took place within the framework of an authoritarian government that denied the seriousness of the pandemic), commissions for peacefully resolving land conflicts – in cases of collective evictions – were created within the courts of justice in December 2022, after the suspension of evictions (which lasted 17 months) ended. The campaign also succeeded in consolidating an interdisciplinary dialog between the field of popular advocacy and other methods of knowledge.
Miguel Ruiz commented on the issue of housing and evictions in Spain after the 2008 crisis. Since then, approximately 2 million people have been evicted. While real estate capital has made strong advances to capture more of the market, there are also housing unions, housing movements, and platforms of people affected by mortgages (like the PAH) that connect the struggle for housing with the anti-racist struggle, stop evictions and propose legislation. They have succeeded in overturning rules that made tenants' conditions more precarious, establishing moratoriums on evictions, mandatory social rent that obligates vulture funds to offer affordable rent to all vulnerable families. There was also a strategy by the social movements to start occupying state institutions to wield governing power. Finally, he emphasized the importance of internationalizing the struggle: if the European Union respected the right to housing within its borders and did not sanction the existence of a legal system that allows all kinds of sacrifices of bodies and territories, it would not allow it to be violated outside, as is now happening in Gaza. Thus, global awareness and democratizing the international sphere are fundamental to allow movements to come together across borders to discuss issues such as vulture funds, global gentrification, the role of transnational companies, or the fact that we can't talk about taxes for the rich without dealing with tax evasion.
Auricélia Arapiuns focused the debate on authoritarianism in Brazil, noting that the indigenous peoples (who number more than 180 distinct groups in the Amazon and, in Brazil, more than 305 indigenous groups) have been suffering from a trajectory of more than 500 years of authoritarianism, involving genocide, ethnocide and ecocide. This has surfaced recently not only during the pandemic, but also with the destruction of nature by megaprojects and agribusiness across different Brazilian governments. She also spoke about the most recent “Marco Temporal” (Temporal Framework), which affects all indigenous peoples in Brazil, making it difficult to access territory, demarcate and title indigenous lands. In this sense, she pointed out that the indigenous movement was strengthened a lot during Bolsonaro’s government because the struggle was unified in the middle of the pandemic, with a camp of more than 10,000 indigenous people, to fight against the Temporal Framework. On the fight against climate collapse, she stated:
“This is a struggle that doesn't just belong to the indigenous movement, but must be international. This isn't a crisis; it's an attempt to destroy our people and the whole world. If you wipe out indigenous territories, you'll be wiped out, too. We are 5% of the world's population, but we protect 80% of the planet's biodiversity. We're not just talking about the lives of indigenous peoples, but the life of the planet.”
– Auricélia Arapiuns.
Finally, Auricélia referred to the importance of including indigenous lawyering, which has nuances compared to movement lawyering, and which is still fighting very hard to be able to reach these spaces. Authoritarianism isn't just in government; it's in universities and in all spaces, and it's very much linked to structural racism, where indigenous people are still seen as incapable of defending their rights. She ended with a quote by Sônia Guajajara, the current Minister for Indigenous Peoples: “To talk about us, you have to be us.”
Marlene Rodríguez delved into the experience of defending the territory of the Union Hidalgo indigenous community in Mexico against a wind farm project that the French transnational company EDF wanted to install in 2017. The company had obtained permission to install the wind farm without the community's participation. ProDESC, together with the community, won a constitutional case for the violation of this right to prior, free and informed consultation. The Mexican government decided to cancel the contracts with the company. Also, in 2020, they filed a transnational lawsuit in French court to seek corporate liability for violating the Due Diligence Act. In this way, an alternative use of the law was made, developing the perspective of “preventive litigation” to defend the territory before megaproject installations are authorized.
Marina Dos Santos, MST state representative in Rio de Janeiro, presented the work of the MST, which turns 40 this year. The MST has been taking land by occupying unproductive areas, especially those that don't fulfill their social function. Despite all the setbacks, the MST has managed to get around 500,000 families in Brazil to occupy the land and is considered the largest producer of organic rice in Latin America, with around 630 encampments in Brazil. This is happening in a context where Brazil is one of the countries with the highest concentration of land in the world - just 1% of landowners own 46% of the land, or almost half of the country.
At an international level, the movement is working with others in Via Campesina International because social movements are facing various crises in the system, ranging from local to international, and the enemies acting against nature and people are the same (agribusiness, hydro and mineral businesses), allied with an extreme right wing that promotes the idea of the anti-state. In the context of the G20, social movements are organizing worldwide to convene the People's Summit around three main axes: the fight against hunger and inequality, sustainable development from an economic, social and environmental perspective, and the reform of global governance.
Finally, Marina emphasized the importance of movement lawyering to strengthen strategic counter-hegemonic actions, with priority given to food production with an environmental bias and a technological matrix focused on agroecology, which needs to be articulated with public policies. It is important to act in defense of institutional democracy and the construction of forms of popular democracy, in addition to the defense of nature.
Speakers
Auricélia Arapiuns: Leader of the Arapium people, President of the Deliberative Council of the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB), Coordinator of the Steering Committee of the National Policy for Territorial and Environmental Management of Indigenous Lands (PNEGATI), Brazil (read bio)
Luana Varejão: Coordinator and movement lawyer at the Centro Popular de Direitos Humanos, Pernambuco, and member of the "Despejo Zero" Campaign, Brazil (read bio)
Marina Dos Santos: MST state representative in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (read bio)
Marlene Rodríguez Atriano: Semi-senior Transnational Justice Lawyer at ProDESC, Mexico (read bio)
Miguel Ruiz Díaz-Reixa: Lawyer, Observatori DESCA, Spain (read bio)
Moderator
Felipe Mesel: Global Programs Manager at Movement Law Lab, Argentina (read bio)
“This is a struggle that doesn't just belong to the indigenous movement, but must be international. This isn't a crisis. It's an attempt to destroy our people and the whole world. If you wipe out indigenous territories, you'll be wiped out too. We are 5% of the world's population, but we protect 80% of the planet's biodiversity. We're not just talking about the lives of indigenous peoples, but the life of the planet.”
— Auricélia Arapiuns
Session 3: The future of international law: the limits of today’s international legal order and potential future horizons
Meena Jagannath introduced the session by highlighting how global governance structures end up defining the contours of how we fight. Institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the UN, by virtue of how they are structured, perpetuate the neoliberal economic model, maintain the Global North-South divide, and preserve imperial power, while failing to meaningfully address the genocide in Gaza and the Ukrainian War. In this way, movement lawyers are dealing with an amalgam of laws and institutions that are beyond the reach of democratic movements and the people. At the same time, we know that we need to find ways to get the most out of this system and use the system strategically to strengthen the power of the people and the movements we accompany, with the understanding that the struggles are interconnected even if they manifest themselves differently in different territories. We must organize ourselves differently and use the law creatively to plant seeds for a more just international system of the future.
Silvia Souza anchored her lecture in the series of decrees that pointed towards an authoritarian state in various dimensions of social life at the beginning of the Bolsonaro administration (revoking more than 250 councils for civil society participation; indiscriminate permission of gun ownership and possession; toughening of criminal legislation with a direct impact on the black population). In 2019, a bill was discussed to repeal the quota law that allows black people access to higher education, and from there the Black Coalition for Rights was created. Faced with the real threat to various rights, a national articulation was necessary for a unified action by the black movement and the Federal Supreme Court became the main locus for combating these setbacks. This struggle dragged on until 2021, when the decrees were finally declared unconstitutional. Finally, he proposed organizing to occupy politics, the judiciary, the Public Prosecutor's Office and other spaces, just as the right-wing religious field is organizing.
Alexandra Montgomery questioned Brazil's historic commitment to human rights treaties, saying that it is a pro forma commitment but not a real one. She said that now human rights are diluted a little in each ministry. At the same time, she pointed out that social networks have been a vehicle for disinformation, reducing space and building hatred, legitimizing anti-democratic and authoritarian spaces. She also referred to the importance of real global solidarity, since there are many projects to restrict liberties and identify potential “dangerous subjects” around the world, such as the use of facial recognition technologies with racist algorithms in Brazil, which is also being used in Palestine and other places.
Jomary Ortegón also identified the tensions generated by the use of the international human rights system, given that it is a system created by the states, but added that:
“We as movement lawyers start from the idea that law is a field of argumentation, and we use what we have at hand to support social struggles” - Jomary Ortegón.
She then identified some elements that characterize her organization’s strategy for working with international law: 1) the integral enforceability of human rights: trying to use all possible avenues (legal, political advocacy, communication and on the streets), and what we achieve in international law feeds into national law and vice-versa; 2) strategic litigation to generate transformations in policies, legislation and public actions, and guarantee non-repetition; 3) an ethic of working with social movements, which means working on joint strategies in a horizontal way. Finally, she spoke of some of CAJAR's achievements in the regional and international system, including: 1) significant work in reconstructing historical memory; 2) arguing the state's responsibility for paramilitarism; 3) the recognition of new rights by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights like the right to defend human rights and the right to informational self-determination, which includes the possibility of asking the state to correct or destroy incorrect information it has collected on us.
Danah Abueida grounded us in the situation on Palestine by noting the surreal nature of talking about legal order or disorder while a genocide is taking place in Gaza.
"Not only are we killed, but our lands and memories are also desecrated (...). The idea of appealing to and pleading with institutions that are detached from the material struggle and resistance –that are continuously compromising and attenuating the demands of the people and denouncing their means of resistance –granting authority and legitimacy to these institutions does not only culminate in a fated failure, but is also a direct betrayal of the struggle. My practical navigation of the [institutional] realm then stems from a moral and political imperative to simply engage with every tool possible while viscerally centering these convictions.”
— Danah Abueida.
She then questioned whether any form of justice for the Palestinian people may be realized from the opinions of the International Court of Justice, which took months to declare the plausibility of genocide, and will take more years for just the possibility of holding the guilty accountable. The work of the European Legal Support Center is informed by cross-movement landscapes and politics, wielding the approach of movement lawyering through real discourse with various parts of the movement, a principle that recognizes law and advocacy as but one of several strategies to propel political and social change in service of liberation. It is also underpinned by the fundamental understanding that no building erected on the ruins of our ancestors will serve us or our cause. But we must still maximize our use of those tools. She closed by saying that real solidarity is that which is shared in a material way, which leads us to unite and cover all fronts together (for example, the environmentalist struggle and the struggle against genocide), ensuring that no one is left alone in any form of struggle.
Pam Spees began with a quote from a mentor of hers: “To be a movement lawyer, you need to know how to dance.” This is even more so the case at a time like the present when, although authoritarianism is not new, it has the potential to overshadow the transformation that we are all still striving to achieve. For this, it is important to focus our horizons on relationships, take risks together, win or lose, but always ask ourselves: is it the right thing to do? Does it build power? She mentioned that she finds hope in the fact that more people are beginning to pay attention to the hypocritical way in which the U.S. has historically been involved in international forums, as if it were an exception.
Dmitri Holtzman related the importance of building the power of movements transnationally by comparing the issues that Black youth are confronting in public education in the U.S. to those experienced by young people in South Africa. In post-Apartheid South Africa, many who were part of the movements became civil servants, resulting in a great demobilization of progressive forces. And while the post-Apartheid constitution looks like a document to guide the liberation movement, South Africa continues to contend with many legacies of Apartheid, such as the unequal education system where schools in Black communities continue to be woefully under- resourced. Now, as young people in the United States are organizing against the “school-to-prison pipeline,”, they are considering implementing the same school policing program in South Africa based on the U.S.’ model. This is just one example of how neoliberal policies, such as policing and privatization, are being exchanged on a transnational level, without there being a corresponding exchange between movement spaces. To combat this, he called for building real ties of transnational solidarity that do not depend exclusively on the international human rights system but rather on the forging connections between movements globally.
Speakers
Alexandra Montgomery: Program Director at Anistia Internacional Brasil, Brazil (read bio)
Danah Abueida: Lawyer, European Legal Support Center, Palestine (read bio)
Dmitri Holtzman: Education Justice and Youth organizer (read bio)
Jomary Ortegón: President of Colectivo de Abogados José Alvear Restrepo (CAJAR), Colombia (read bio)
Pamela Spees: Senior Staff Attorney, CCR, USA (read bio)
Silvia Souza: President of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) of the Brazilian Bar Association, Brazil (read bio)
Moderator
Meena Jagannath: Director of Global Programs at Movement Law Lab, Coordinator of the Global Network of Movement Lawyers, USA (read bio)
