GENEVA (23 May 2012) – Two United Nations experts on food and indigenous peoples today urged South-East Asian states not to sideline the human rights of communities across the region who derive their livelihoods, traditions and ways of life directly from their natural environments.

The Voluntary Guidelines are the result of an unprecedented negotiation process, chaired by the United States that featured broad consultation and participation by 96 national governments, more than 25 civil society organizations, the private sector, nonprofits and farmers’ associations over the course of almost three years.

UNESCO’s project on poverty has focused on a conceptual analysis of poverty within a human rights framework.

Through this project, the Organization seeks to stimulate commitment within the international community to assume its moral obligation to take action for the eradication of poverty, and to contribute towards the realization of human rights for all peoples without discrimination of any kind.

This publication outlines a range of concrete examples to demonstrate that access to justice is possible and useful to protect the victims of violations of the right to food. In the first section, we show that the traditional arguments against the justiciability of the right to food are today outdated. In the second part, we describe the conditions for ensuring that the victims of violations of the right to food have access to justice. We lay out the legal systems in which the access to justice is possible, and address the remaining gaps in other legal systems. Finally, we provide an analysis of current international, regional, and national jurisprudence and assess the impact of the access to justice on the full realization of the right to food.