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Natural Justice is an organisation rooted in the struggles of communities in Africa. As a team of pioneering lawyers and legal experts, we specialise in human rights and environmental law in pursuit of social and environmental justice.
Natural Justice strives to enhance the collective rights of people and protect the sacred relationships that indigenous peoples and local communities have with nature. Our work is informed by the values, knowledge and self-determination of the communities whom we stand in solidarity with.
Through legal empowerment, research, policy influencing and litigation, and as part of coalitions and campaigns, we support communities to know the law, use the law and shape the law.
Natural Justice was founded in 2007 in Cape Town by two international lawyers, Harry Jonas and Sanjay “Kabir” Bavikatte. They founded Natural Justice to ensure better protection for the rights and responsibilities of indigenous peoples and local communities at the local, national and international level. A collective of six people ran the organisation while it expanded in geographic scope and programmatic areas.
The organisation sought to combine legal empowerment with social mobilisation to support communities to better understand the effects that laws and legal processes were having on them, and to develop robust, proactive responses to protect and promote their ways of life. This led them to adopt and adapt the concept of ‘community protocols’ in 2008. From the start, Natural Justice was active at the global policy level and played a key role in the recognition of community protocols in the 2010 Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing.