On the Frontlines: Environmental Defenders in a Turbulent World

10h00: On the Frontlines: Environmental Defenders in a Turbulent World

Claudia Ituarte-Lima -Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law

In turbulent times, biosphere defenders stand at the frontlines of protecting ecosystems and communities’ wellbeing, often at great personal risk. Drawing on insights from the Defendbio project “Biosphere Defenders Leveraging Legal and Governance Tools for Just Sustainability Transformations” and beyond, Claudia explores what it means to be a defender today, with a particular focus on law as both a tool for positive change and a weapon of silencing—through abusive lawsuits and other legal threats. She will highlight strategies of scaling-out through cross-border solidarity and scaling-up by ensuring that frontline legal insights reach decision-making spaces such as the Conference of the Parties of Multilateral Environmental Agreements and the EU Parliament. She will also refer to the report commissioned by the European Parliament that she co-authored with Maria Andrea Nardi and Britta Sjosterdt: Environmental human rights defenders: new developments and their implications for the European Union and the European Parliament . Finally, she will reflect on how legal empowerment, transnational collaboration, and awareness-raising can strengthen the realization of defenders’ rights and amplify their voices in shaping our shared future in which the law is leveraged to advance sustainability and justice. 

10h30 Roundtable: What It Means to Be a Defender: Voices from the Frontlines

Chair: Liliana Lizarazo-Rodriguez, Brussels School of Governance, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium)

•  Beyond Allyship? Activist Scholarship and Indigenous Environmental Defenders

  Lieselotte Viaene, Human Rights Center, University of Ghent (Belgium)

• Children as Defenders of the Planet

  Kata Dozsa, Brussels School of Governance, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium)

• NGOS as Human Rights and Environmental Defenders

  Wies Willems, Broederlijk Delen,  (Belgium) 

11h00 Open Discussion

12h00 Lunch

Speakers

Claudia Ituarte-Lima is an international public lawyer and scholar on human rights, biodiversity, and climate change law and policy. She is Thematic Lead and Senior Researcher at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute and Director of the Global Network for Human Rights and the Environment. She holds a MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from University College London. Her contributions have shaped global policy, including the adoption of guidelines on human rights safeguards by the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, and she has served as an expert for the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). She has also led capacity-strengthening initiatives for judges, prosecutors, and environmental defenders, bringing a global yet contextually grounded perspective to environmental justice.

Lieselotte Viaene is a Belgian-Flemish legal and environmental anthropologist with a PhD in Law (2011) and a Senior Fellowship at the Human Rights Centre, Ghent University. For nearly two decades, Lieselotte has collaborated with Indigenous communities in Latin America (Guatemala, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú) and Nepal—ranging from genocide survivors to networks of Indigenous lawyers. Her research spans legal pluralism, Indigenous rights, transitional justice, the decolonization of human rights, and natural resource governance. She is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Starting Grant project RIVERS – Water/Human Rights Beyond the Human?, a six-year interdisciplinary project (2019–2026), which explores Indigenous water ontologies, plurilegal encounters, and interlegal translation through fieldwork in Nepal, Guatemala, Colombia, and at the UN.

Kata Dozsa is a postdoctoral researcher at the Brussels School of Governance where she conducts empirical research in the ERC Curiae Virides project on transnational ecological litigation. She holds a PhD in law from University of Antwerp. Between 2011 and 2018, she worked for the European Commission in various posts, such as press officer for Climate Action and later as policy officer for the rights of the child. Kata Dozsa is the author of the book “Children as Climate Citizens” (Routledge, 2023), and she has numerous publications about children’s rights, the rights of future generations and climate change, including in the 2020 and 2023 editions of the European Yearbook on Human Rights. She was awarded the 2022 Sustainability Research Award for my contribution to climate change policy-development in Belgium.

Wies Willems: is a senior policy advisor at the Belgian NGO Broederlijk Delen. His areas of expertise are natural resources and environmental justice, human rights, and corporate accountability. Wies conducts research and advocacy work at the Belgian and EU levels, in close collaboration with partner organisations, mainly from Latin America.