Research and Other Publications
Building African Capacity to Develop and Implement Environmental Law
Helping East African Lawyers Use Legal Tools to Protect the Environment
For environmental protection to be effective in Africa, civil society and governments must possess the technical and organizational capacity to address legal challenges on their own. Yet, environmental law courses are still just emerging at most African law schools. As a result, few practicing lawyers have the experience or knowledge to effectively argue environmental cases or otherwise implement environmental law.
In response to requests from East African NGOs to build the capacity of East African government and non-government lawyers to effectively bring and argue environmental cases, ELI and its partners (Greenwatch, Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment, the African Centre for Technology Studies, the Lawyers’ Environmental Action Team, and the World Resources Institute) held a workshop on “Access to Environmental Justice in East Africa.” The workshop was convened June 18-21, 2000 in Jinja, Uganda. This workshop brought together more than 30 litigators from Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to share strategies and lessons learned, and to expand their knowledge of substantive environmental law. In preparing for this workshop, ELI and its partners collected the important environmental laws and cases from the three countries and prepared additional analytical materials, all of which were distributed in a three-volume reference set. Access to legal precedents is particularly important for lawyers in these common-law countries, which lack comprehensive case reporters and digests, and as a result do not have ready access to judicial decisions bearing on the environment. In East African legal systems, judges and advocates rely on (and defer to) prior cases, yet neither judges nor lawyers seeking to protect the environment have practical access to these cases.
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