There is a rapidly growing consensus around the private sector responsibility to respect human rights, including environmental and participation rights. The responsibility applies “over and above” local laws and is satisfied by the process of Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD). Although it has “compliance” and risk managements aspects, HRDD is also a powerful for relationship-building, responsibly drawing on local knowledge, and avoiding conflict in favor of alignment and flow.

We have studied the advantages of the HRDD approach and work to promote it and develop best practice in numerous forums. Many fail to appreciated how deeply  HRDD aims to be cost-effective and realistic. Under the framework, obligations are scaled to size/resources, prioritization is understood to be necessity, and action depends on an org’s level of control, linkage, or leverage. And critically, human rights risk is presumed, even normalized, opening space for “leaning in,” learning, and long-term approaches, rather than rushed “fixes” based on idealized policy language. See Recent Engagements.

Today, Forum Nobis helps organizations design and implement HRDD systems aligned with these reasonable expectations and designed to deliver broader benefits. We conduct field-based human rights screenings, human rights impact assessments (HRIAs), and other forms of risk analysis. We design Environmental and Social Safeguards (ESS) systems and tools, at the organizational level or on a project-specific basis. We support communities to engage in the HRDD process, track standards and progress, design preferred mitigation options, and protect their rights generally.

Robust rightsholder engagement is a core element of HRDD. Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) is now a widely recognized legal requirement under national law and international human rights law for any work that impacts Indigenous lands, resources, cultures, or interests. FPIC plays a key role in the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) and is a lodestar of best practice for work with all local communities. However, FPIC is a baseline: the foundational, multi-dimensional right to self-determination, as set out in the UNDRIP, requires much more.

We have played critical roles in the development of these norms for decades. We also recognize that today’s most pressing challenges involve the complexities of implementation. For example, FPIC disputes between and within communities; reaching “informed” consent regarding complex technical concepts; landscape- scale FPIC; FPIC for community-led projects; intergenerational dimensions. We support conversations on these topics in academic, legal, and practice-based forums. See Recent Engagements.

Today, Forum Nobis helps organizations co-design FPIC processes with communities, conduct preliminary screenings, and facilitate processes that build trust while reaching outcomes in a timely and efficient manner. We support communities inunderstanding and protecting their FPIC and UNDRIP rights, build baseline knowledge and capacity, negotiate benefit-sharing agreements, design implementation and monitoring plans, and more.

Our experience tells us that genuine human rights protection over the long term depends as much on our deeply human habits and practices of trust, teamwork, and support, as it does on technical knowledge and policy. We have also come to know the value of conflict as an acknowledgment of presence, care, and purpose. “Good trouble” puts a spotlight on what matters most. While we need strategies to de-escalate high conflict and unsafe behavior, we need to regulate conflict to draw out its potential for building trust, knowledge, and momentum for change.

We have assembled customized approaches and resources on how to build the trust and support necessary for human rights work, relying on a portfolio of facilitation, coaching, teaching, and conflict resolution trainings and experiences through the years. We are skilled with both dialogic and somatic practices. We respect the need to move at the speed of trust, but also include awareness of time and resource constraints and prioritizations needs within our facilitation work. See Recent Engagements.

Today, Forum Nobis helps organizations build trust and effectiveness in their human rights teams, and safely recognize, regulate, and resolve conflict within the org and between partners and communities. We also design Grievance and Remedy Mechanisms (GRMs) that satisfy accountability requirements while delivering deeper relationship-building and knowledge-generation benefits. We support communities to engage with orgs and GRMs, including serving as ombuds or mediator in appropriate circumstances.

New technologies are often hastily framed as threats to human rights. While this is often true, it is often inadequate. New technologies present a mix of risk and opportunity. Disrespecting this balance leads to distorted outcomes. Our most essential human rights increasingly depend on, are even defined by, tech practices and platforms. Too often we left with the narrow, false choice between human rights protection and technology access or advancement.

We study, teach, publish, and practice at the dynamic intersection of tech and human rights. We work on the impacts and implications of privacy regulation, content moderation, platform social impacts, AI safety, biotechnology, earth science data, and equity and access issues for diverse communities and identities. Critically, we are working to expand the conversation around Indigenous technology, recognizing IPs in design and use cases, and using equity and access for Indigenous-led technology self-determination. See Recent Engagements.

Today, Forum Nobis helps technologists to conduct due diligence to meet their responsibility to respect human rights, most critically at the design and scaling stages of product development. We support communities to identify and advocate for their rights with straightforward impact analysis, as well as strategic development of frameworks that better serve access, equity, participation, and self-determined Indigenous solutions.

Human rights law protects culture in both straightforward and complex ways. Many disenfranchised communities and identities are critically under-protected by traditional IP frameworks. These frameworks, however, often reflect structural inequities or are ill-suited to the complex collective rights to culture that underpin the foundational right to self-determination.

We have spent years helping communities leverage international and national cultural rights frameworks (WIPO, UNESCO, CBD/Nagoya, USPTO/LOC) for issues with copyright and trademark, cultural heritage and expressions, geographical indications, genetic resources, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), and more. We also support new conversations around data sovereignty and UNDRIP cultural rights, and how to integrate new approaches with existing enforcement tools, access rights, and transparency norms. See Recent Engagements.

Today, Forum Nobis supports communities to define and enforce their culture and data rights, pursue remedy strategies (including rematriation), negotiate licensing and equitable benefit-sharing, design monitoring and enforcement systems, and more. We support organizations toensure that their activities and relationships are consistent with the rapidly evolving standards in this area.

The wide-ranging “green economy” is booming: carbon market projects; the renewable energy transition and its underlying supply chains; sustainable products design and manufacturing; “climate tech” and Nature-based Solutions (NbS). Communities are increasingly choosing to engage as part of their economic development and self-determination strategies. However, it is widely recognized that this “new” economy, while critical to the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss, will tend to replicate and exacerbate unjust power structures and exploitative practices of the existing global economy unless it rigorously reorients to a rights and equity-based approach. This is often called the Just Transition.

We work on this reorientation at the layer between local communities and policy, finance, and scientific innovators who positioned to think at a global scale. There is a vast potential for alignment here, yet there are deep rifts of conflict and misunderstanding. See Recent Engagements.

Today, Forum Nobis helps green economy actors map their ideas and ambitions to the local level using a rights-based approach. We help project developers meet engagement and safeguards requirements, we help buyers and funders ensure and assist with compliance, we help designers conduct due diligence and expand their use cases. We support communities advocate for more direct finance and leadership roles, negotiate agreements, resolve internal and external disputes, and build knowledge, capacity, and resilience.

People will have different views of the facts. Especially when the stakes are high, or when people feel their rights are under attack. Even in the most fraught situations, however, there can be moments of opportunity. A willingness to construct a shared narrative. A change in mood, where it becomes possible for an authoritative, fair-minded, compelling account of the facts to shift the debate to the next level, rather than just feed the fire.

Forum Nobis can help with public fact-finding processes, independent reviews, and internal investigations. Aaron Marr Page observed and assisted his first public fact-finding mission over 20 years ago, helping the Khoi-San people be heard by the South African Human Rights Commission. In private law practice with Forum Nobis and earlier at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, he assisted a variety of investigations and honed the key interviewing, evidence collection, documentation, analysis, and reporting skills necessary for the work. Forum Nobis is accustomed to working on matters with significant media attention and can assist in crisis communications environments.

We are seeing more and more attacks on human rights defenders each year. Why? Because as the power of the human rights framework grows, the threat to entrenched powers and prerogatives grows too. And because attacks on defenders can have a doubly oppressive effect, not only silencing the defender but also all the voices that the defender represents. Defenders, the gateways to realizing the promise of human rights, need our protection more than ever.

Forum Nobis helps defenders who face assaults, retaliatory lawsuits, criminal charges, and other harassment and intimidation triggered by their advocacy. We have unique experience defending against some of the most sophisticated and multi-pronged attacks seen in recent years, and have worked in partnership with leading defender organizations such as the Environmental Defender Law Center and the Civil Liberties Defense Center.

Forum Nobis may also be available in particular circumstances to help organizations understand and respect any “bystander” obligations they may have to persecuted defenders in places where they work.

International law is the law of treaties, multilateral agreements, international institutions, customary international law, and the jurisprudence of international tribunals. It covers issues such as human rights, territorial boundaries, climate change, environmental protection, trade and investment, intellectual property, diplomatic relations, law of the sea, humanitarian law, international criminal law, international arbitration, and the law and practice of international institutions, as well as how all this intersects with domestic law and legal institutions. It is an enormously wide-ranging and complex field of law, with far more “real life” impacts than many people realize—yet the practice itself remains relatively small, highly specialized, and largely inaccessible to those affected.

Forum Nobis help communities and organizations with research, advice, and, in very select cases, legal representation. Forum Nobis aims to offer international legal services on a pro bono or low bono basis to certain clients as part of its mission of promoting a more equitable and inclusive international legal discourse.