Right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent

The Center is collaborating with renowned indigenous and customary land and resource rights activist organizations to develop a groundbreaking Toolkit and Guide for drafting a Model Law for Free, Prior, and Informed Consent rights.

We are working with The Alternative Information Development Centre (AIDC) and the Land and Accountability Research Centre (LARC), both organizations are based in South Africa. Our partner communities and land rights organizations are primarily based in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Region. 

AIDC works with communities and organizations in the SADC region on issues related to FPIC related to land and resource rights. The LARC works on issues related to tenure security, traditional governance, and mining in rural communities across South Africa. 

Rural black and communities of color face continued, immense, and imminent  threats of forced dispossession of and removal from their traditional and ancestral lands in the name of ‘development’ and other extractive industries - the benefit of which they never reap - in violation of their existing indigenous and customary rights.

This Toolkit is a guide for any such community or organization to draft a Model Law for the protection of their Free, Prior and Informed Consent rights that is relevant and responsive. A law that codifies the right to FPIC as it relates to extractive and development practices broadly in their context. This law can then be taken to legislative bodies in the country to shape new, existing, and pending laws. 

The Toolkit will be informed by international, regional, and comparative legal research. The Toolkit is being developed in conjunction with affected communities through a combination of desktop research and direct engagement, which includes convenings, webinars, and interviews. 

Fordham students have had the opportunity to work with us in developing and implementing the project.