Roehampton Law School Professor presents at United Nations headquarters
- Thursday, January 25, 2018
Professor Jérémie Gilbert from the Roehampton Law School is presenting this week at the United Nations headquarters in New York in a meeting to support indigenous people’s rights to land.
Professor Gilbert will be speaking at the Expert Group Meeting on Sustainable Development in Territories of Indigenous Peoples. He will advise on his expertise as a legal advocate in several cases of land dispossession faced by indigenous people across the globe.
He will be presenting his recent report entitled Land Grabbing Investment and Indigenous People’s Rights to Land and Natural Resources is on the phenomenon of ‘land grabbing’, (the acquisition of land for commercial or industrial uses) which has increased encroachment on indigenous peoples’ territories, one of the major threats faced by indigenous peoples in today’s world.
Professor Gilbert said ‘Violent conflicts directly related to land issues are increasing and as a result indigenous peoples are increasingly suffering systematic human rights violations, internal displacement, as well as loss of their cultural identity, destruction of their livelihoods, poverty, permanent environmental damage, pollution and loss of biodiversity in their traditional lands and territories. It is vital to protect their primary source of livelihood’.
The meeting is organised to support the mandate of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, one of the leading international institutions on issues regarding indigenous peoples.
To read Professor Gilbert’s report please click here. To see a video about ‘A Day in the Life of a Human Rights Lawyer’, please click here.
The Department of Social Sciences is rated one of the best in the UK for the impact of our social sciences research (REF 2014). The Roehampton Law School offers LLM in Human Rights and Legal Practice, launching in September 2018, with an emphasis on law in practice; the LLM students will be encouraged to develop valuable critical thinking skills, useful as a lawyer or as transferable skills for many other professions in the modern workforce.