Legal empowerment

We strengthen people’s ability to know, use and shape the law, through participatory popular education, peer learning and experience-based resources developed through bottom-up processes. This amplifies our partners’ collective power-building efforts.

Legal practice workshops and communities

We facilitate workshops exploring substantive and procedural issues in non-discrimination law and discussing uses of law for social change, as well as dynamic, creative and supportive communities of practice.

Experience across diverse settings has shown the value of legal empowerment as an important complement to traditional organizing and empowerment work. Legal empowerment approaches enable individuals from marginalized and discriminated communities to participate directly and meaningfully in often-complex litigation processes.

Strategic litigation

We work jointly with partners to design, build and deploy strategic litigation and law-based advocacy relying on human rights guarantees. Our cooperative processes center the aspirations, leadership, and expertise of communities directly impacted by racism and discrimination, and embed (RE)Claim’s legal actions in broader change strategies to advance an ambitious agenda for systemic reforms.

With favourable legal norms, a strong justice system and skilled and creative lawyers, France is a fertile ground for legal strategies. (RE)Claim’s founders and partners tested them over the last decade on the issue of racial profiling with demonstrated success – and we continue to build on the lessons we learned.

(RE)Claim’s ‘movement lawyering’ approach explicitly seeks to amplify community organizing and collective power-building efforts among racialized and marginalized communities. This approach remains little-known in France and much of Western Europe.

Research and documentation

(RE)Claim works with partners to design research to undergird our strategic litigation, building the evidentiary basis that will demonstrate the truth of a claim before courts, while also nourishing complementary advocacy and organizing. We prioritize participative methodologies and oral testimonies that visibilize first-hand experiences and impacts of discrimination.

Research is a crucial, but often neglected, building block for successful litigation and advocacy. People facing discrimination clearly understand the problem, yet it is often dismissed or denied by judges, policy makers, and the broader public. Research exposes systemic discrimination, documenting its impacts, identifying the drivers and factors that perpetuate it, and developing solutions to end it.