EarthRights has been supporting communities affected by environmental harms for over three decades by bringing together the power of law and power of people. Our approach relies on a community of lawyers and legal advocates working with communities and campaigners. EarthRights works to build this community of lawyers from the ground up. This includes a training program for junior lawyers and legal advocates, the Mekong Legal Advocacy Institute (MLAI) and our alumni network which brings together legal advocates from MLAI and campaigners and community leaders from the EarthRights School. Another crucial element of this community is the Mekong Legal Network (MLN).
The Mekong Legal Network
MLN is an independent, member-led network of over 30 public interest lawyers and legal advocates that was founded in 2009 by leading lawyers from the Mekong Region with support from EarthRights. Its members come from Vietnam, Lao PDR, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar and China and together they are responsible for pioneering lawsuits and legal advocacy across the region.
While the civic spaces and legal systems of the Mekong region vary greatly, they share many common challenges including rapid development, transboundary investments, impacts from the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. The network is a platform where lawyers can exchange strategies, share best practices, and engage in cross-border collaboration to safeguard environmental and human rights. The network also creates space for groups that are often marginalized in the legal sector, with its members frequently representing indigenous groups, and members that include leading indigenous lawyers and a majority of women.
MLN members’ work ranges from ensuring community voices are heard within legal processes and pushing for the protection of community rights, the environment and biodiversity in regional laws and policies, to groundbreaking lawsuits that hold corporations accountable for transboundary harms. The wealth of expertise within MLN is extraordinary. Examples of members’ work include the first successful environmental lawsuits in Myanmar, advising communities that are considering benefit sharing of carbon credits in Cambodia, supporting communities document harms from rare earth minings on Laos, Myanmar and Thailand and holding Thai corporations to account for land grabs in Cambodia.
EarthRights acts as an informal secretariat for MLN, providing funding, logistical support and technical expertise. This ensures that the network is a trusted space where its members can share legal and advocacy strategies. It also ensures that EarthRights alumni, from both the EarthRights School and MLAI, have access to the legal expertise they need to support communities across the region. EarthRights also helps connect MLN and its members to global networks and expertise. For example, bringing in partners from the Philippines to share expertise from lawsuits on climate mitigation, taking MLN members to Latin America to share experiences from the Escazu Agreement (a regional environmental rights treaty) and making applications in the U.S. courts for discovery when companies in the U.S. are linked to projects impact communities here in the Mekong.