PILIWA Partners and Cases

PILIWA works with the Center for Public Interest Law (CEPIL) and the Legal Resources Center (LRC).  CEPIL is one of the originators of PILIWA and serves as an administrative and financial host for the network.  Our collaboration includes:

• Assisting a mining-affected to the community to gather the scientific evidence needed to identify environmental and health impacts.
• Fighting alongside a community whose chief is seeking to take villagers’ farmland and sell it to plantation developers
• Connecting communities facing unjust eviction for destructive development projects with lawyers who can train them on their rights and legal-based advocacy skills.

PILIWA works with The Same Rights for All (Les Mêmes Droits pour Tous, or MDT) and the Center for International Trade for Development (Centre du Commerce International pour le Développement, or CECIDE).  Our collaboration includes:

• Helping to design and implement a community-based survey on the impacts of a mining company that displaced hundreds of families during an expansion of its project
• Organizing a fact-finding mission to investigate and develop legal strategies for a case of mass violence against mining protesters
• Strategic advice and support to partner organizations

We work with Green Advocates International (GAI), Liberia’s only public interest environmental law firm.  Our collaboration includes:

• Supporting GAI to upgrade its capabilities on land mapping and other technical skills to serve communities threatened by corporate land grabbing
• Working with GAI to develop a litigation and advocacy strategy targeting land and livelihoods destruction in the rubber industry

We work with the Network for the Promotion of Human Rights and Good Governance (Réseau pour la Promotion des Droits humains et la Bonne Gouvernance, or Réseau DH-Gouvernance).  Our collaboration includes:

• Organizing a series of seminars for civil society, judges, and other legal practitioners on land rights and land-grabbing in Niger
• Supporting fact-finding missions to investigate incidents of threatened and actual land-grabbing in remote regions of the country
• Assisting Niger lawyers to combat cases of urban land-grabbing through legal strategy and financial support

We work with Law Edge Advocacy Project (LEAP), Chima Williams & Associates, and the Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (IHRHL).  Our collaboration includes:

• Representing the community of Aggah in a complaint against the Italian oil giant Eni to end perennial floods caused by the company’s operations [link to Aggah sub-page]
• Providing a grant to enable Chima Williams & Associates to hire a Legal Fellow
• Fighting gas flaring through scientific investigation, legal strategizing, and financial support to LEAP

We work with the Network Movement for Justice and Development (NMJD).  Our collaboration includes:

• Providing a grant to enable NMJD to hire a Legal Fellow and launch its Legal Program
• Assisting NMJD to develop legal strategies for communities affected by environmental destruction, loss of livelihoods, and violence in diamond-mining regions
• Identifying and pursuing strategies to prove the health impacts of mining

We work with the Zircon Resistance Committee (Comité de Lutte contre le zircon) and Me Assane Dioma Ndiaye, a well-known Senegalese human rights lawyer.  Our collaboration includes:

• Providing strategic legal support to communities in the southern region of Casamance who are trying to prevent a zircon mining project that could devastate their fields and water supply