By: Charlie Meidino Albajili, Programme Officer for Access to Justice/Business and Human Rights, Jakarta Office
The Raoul Wallenberg Institute’s Regional Asia Pacific Programme has published a new paper on access to justice in environmental matters in Southeast Asia. It consolidates lessons from RWI’s work with practitioners across the region into a form that responds to what AICHR has indicated it needs for the Regional Plan of Action (RPA) under the ASEAN Declaration on the Right to a Safe, Clean, Healthy and Sustainable Environment (ADER), supplementary to RWI’s input to the Call for Inputs.
The paper is not a legal mapping and it does not present a set of recommendations. Its contribution is experiential: it records what practitioners described when speaking to peers about their own working conditions, and what they identified as having worked.
Why this paper, and why now
ADER was adopted at the 47th ASEAN Summit in October 2025, and under Commitment 6, ASEAN tasked AICHR, in consultation with relevant sectoral bodies including ASOEN, with developing an ASEAN-owned and ASEAN-led Regional Plan of Action to follow up on its implementation. As a soft-law instrument, ADER’s effect will depend on how it is operationalised nationally and regionally. The RPA is the process in which the Declaration acquires practical content, and the Call for Inputs is the moment at which evidence can shape what goes forward.
Grounded in regional practice
The lessons are drawn from RWI’s own engagement between 2024 and 2026: courses, dialogues, consultations and case analysis carried out with judges, prosecutors, public interest lawyers, NHRIs, Indigenous Peoples’ representatives, civil society and academic partners, and AICHR. The paper states the limits of that base openly. It is practitioner-facing rather than grassroots, country coverage is uneven, and participation was self-selecting.
A gap between authority held and authority exercised
The paper’s central observation is that the procedural architecture largely exists. Across the jurisdictions this engagement reached, practitioners rarely identified a missing entitlement. Standing rules, evidentiary procedures, remedies, protective provisions and institutions with relevant mandates are in place in some form, and in several jurisdictions are notably developed.
What practitioners described instead was the distance between authority held and authority exercised, and between procedural entitlements on paper and the conditions under which people can use them. That distance is measured in cost, institutional capability, access to information, coordination and personal safety.
The practices they identified as effective followed the same pattern. Standing was widened through rules of court rather than legislation. Guidance on assessing scientific evidence was issued by the Supreme Court. Protection was extended through investigation and convening by institutions that already held those powers.
The route a claim has to travel
The lessons are organised in four clusters tracing the route a claim must take: reaching a forum, making the case, obtaining a durable remedy, and protecting those who claim rights. The barriers are cumulative rather than isolated. A claimant who satisfies a liberal standing rule may still be unable to fund expert evidence; one who proves causation may find the judgment unenforced; one who could do both may be deterred by the risk of a lawsuit in return. Addressing any single barrier tends to shift the point of failure rather than remove it.
Transboundary environmental harm runs across all four clusters rather than sitting in one, intensifying each obstacle at the point where a national system reaches the limits of its jurisdiction, evidentiary reach, enforcement capacity or territorial mandate. What practitioners described as working here is cooperative rather than adjudicatory.
The paper also raises an interpretive question. The constituencies whose access is most constrained are those the legal system does not fully acknowledge: people working to promote and protect environmental rights, whose function ADER’s preamble describes without naming, and communities whose customary tenure is absent from the records the legal system consults. Because they appear principally in the preamble, giving practical effect to those commitments depends on treating the preamble as an integral part of the Declaration.
What this suggests for the Regional Plan of Action
Most of the operative authority sits nationally: the powers to amend standing rules, resource legal aid, publish environmental data, protect against strategic lawsuits, recognise customary tenure and enforce judgments. The regional contribution the lessons demonstrate is of a different kind, lying in convening actors who would not otherwise meet, enabling comparison across legal systems, articulating common reference points, and supporting the capacity to act on them. On this evidence, the Plan of Action is likely to add most value by helping institutions exercise the authority they already hold more coherently, consistently and collaboratively.
Read the paper
Lessons from Practice: Strengthening Access to Justice in Environmental Matters across Southeast Asia is available to read and download here.
It is authored by Charlie Meidino Albajili and edited by Windi Arini. RWI gratefully acknowledges Atty. Roberto Cadiz, who contributed to the initial draft from which the paper developed, conducted a stakeholder survey during the scoping phase, and opened the Regional Roundtable Dialogue in Bangkok in December 2025. RWI is also grateful to the judges, prosecutors, public interest lawyers, NHRI officials, Indigenous Peoples’ representatives, environmental human rights defenders, and civil society and academic partners whose deliberations form the evidence base of the paper.
This publication was produced under the RWI Regional Asia Pacific Programme Phase II (RAPP II) with the support of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of RWI, Sida, or the participating institutions.
