The United Nations University Office at the UN, New York (UNU-ONY) in cooperation with
the International Development Law Organization (IDLO), is organizing a panel discussion entitled "A Place to Call Our Own: Land Disputes and the Rights of the Poor".
Subsequent to the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor’s 2008 report, Making the Law Work for Everyone, IDLO launched a legal empowerment working paper series and related edited volume. The working paper series documents experience with legal empowerment programs in a wide range of jurisdictions around the world, including those in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. The contributions showcase the diversity of activities that can be grouped under the broad concept of legal empowerment, recently defined by the Secretary-General as “the process of systemic change through which the poor are protected and enabled to use the law to advance their rights and interests as citizens and economic actors.”
This panel discussion is intended to highlight some of the knowledge and ideas relating to legal empowerment that have been captured in the IDLO working paper series. Some of the notable initial contributions of the papers include:
• Identifying unifying characteristics that link the diversity of legal empowerment approaches;
• An understanding of legal empowerment that is more comprehensive than the predominant focus on livelihood issues in the report of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor;
• Recognition of the complex social forces that affect the efficacy of legal empowerment programming; and
• Analyses of the dynamic interrelation between state and civil society in legal empowerment programming and in legal reform more generally.
Date: Thursday, November, 19, 2009
Time: 13:15 p.m. to 14:30 p.m New York Time
Email
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
MySpace
Digg
Delicious
Reddit