Jérémie Gilbert

Across many publications, I have developed a robust human rights-based framework for the governance of natural resources, arguing that international human rights law can and should play a central role in regulating how natural resources are managed. In my book Natural Resources and Human Rights: An Appraisal, I show how existing human rights norms, such as the right to life, health, water, and a healthy environment, can be used to challenge environmentally destructive projects and to demand community participation, consent, and fair benefit-sharing.

My work particularly focuses on the unfulfilled right of peoples to freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources (common Article 1 of the ICCPR and ICESCR) which is crucial for ensuring that local and Indigenous communities retain control over resources on their territories. 

Key publications on this theme include:

• Natural Resources and Human Rights: An Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2018): Analyzes human rights norms like participation, consent, and benefit-sharing to promote sustainable resource management over market-driven approaches.​
• Fighting the Resource Curse: The Rights of Citizens Over Natural Resources (co-authored with Leif Wenar, Northwestern Journal of Human Rights, 2020): Frames the resource curse as a human rights violation, advocating citizens’ rights to subsistence from resource revenues.
• “The Right to Freely Dispose of Natural Resources: Utopia or Forgotten Right?” (Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, 2013): Revives the underused right from self-determination treaties to counter resource conflicts and poverty.

This work is complemented by my role as an advisor to Clean Trade, see: https://www.cleantrade.org/ 

In collaboration with Leif Wenar, I co-authored an article on the “rights of citizens over natural resources,” framing resource rights as human rights and arguing that citizens have a right to benefit from their country’s resources and to ensure that revenues are not used corruptly but are used first to secure their means of subsistence. This approach reframes the “resource curse” not just as an economic or governance problem, but as a human rights issue, requiring reforms in both exporting and importing states and in corporate and investor behavior.

I am the author of several key works that directly address Indigenous land rights under international human rights law, emphasizing collective ownership, self-determination, and protection from dispossession.

Representative work includes:

• Indigenous Peoples’ Land Rights under International Law: From Victims to Actors (Transnational Publishers, 2006, 2nd ed. Brill, 2016)). This book analyses how international law addresses Indigenous peoples’ rights to their traditional territories and examines the evolution of standards such as collective property, self-determination, and restitution. This is still the only book specifically dedicated to analysing land rights under international law. 
• Land Grabbing, Investments and Indigenous Peoples’ Rights to Land and Natural Resources: Case Studies and Legal Analysis (IWGIA). This work explores how large-scale land investments affect Indigenous communities and proposes legal strategies to protect their rights.

I am also the author of several key academic works on indigenous peoples and litigation, with a strong focus on land rights, strategic litigation, and legal empowerment.

• Indigenous Peoples and Litigation: Strategies for Legal Empowerment”**, *Journal of Human Rights Practice* (2020), examines how litigation can function as a form of legal empowerment for Indigenous communities, analysing strategies, risks and opportunities.[2][4][5]
• “Litigating Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Africa: Potentials, Challenges and Limitations”**, *International and Comparative Law Quarterly* 66(3) (2017), explores recent African cases on Indigenous rights, including land and development, and assesses the broader potential and constraints of litigation as a tool.
• “‘Mapping for Rights’: Indigenous Peoples, Litigation and Legal Empowerment”**, *Erasmus Law Review* (2018, with Ben Begbie-Clench), analyses the use of mapping in Indigenous land rights cases and its dual role as courtroom evidence and a community empowerment tool.

My academic work is influenced and guided by my practical work which includes providing expert legal briefs, opinions, and evidence in global cases on Indigenous land rights, often linked to natural resource conflicts (see section on strategic litigation)

My work argues that international human rights law has evolved to protect nomadic peoples’ land rights despite historical biases favoring sedentary land use, enabling nomads to claim legal recognition of their dynamic “nomadic territories” through norms on property, culture, self-determination, and non-discrimination.

I have developed a special expertise on the rights of nomadic and semi-nomadic communities. My research on nomadic communities further explores land rights, freedom of movement, and resource management within human rights frameworks. I l made pioneering contributions to the rights of nomadic peoples by developing a human rights-based framework that recognizes their unique needs for mobility, land access, and traditional livelihoods, challenging sedentary biases in international law.

My work integrates nomadic rights into Indigenous peoples’ frameworks, influencing UN processes and strategic litigation to secure mobility, resource access, and cultural survival against development pressures. His research highlights nomadic territories as dynamic spaces deserving legal recognition beyond static property concept.

Key Publications

• Nomadic Peoples and Human Rights (Routledge, 2014): Offers an innovative rights-based analysis of nomadism, addressing discrimination, persecution, freedom of movement, land rights, water resources, and access to services, while proposing legal protections against forced sedentarization.​
• “Nomadic Territories: A Human Rights Approach to Nomadic Peoples’ Land Rights” (Human Rights Law Review, vol. 7, no. 4, 2007, pp. 681–716): Argues that human rights law evolves to grant nomads rights to live traditionally on their lands, overcoming historical barriers like “effective occupation” criteria through norms on property, culture, and self-determination.​
• “Land Rights and Nomadic Peoples: Using International Human Rights Law to Determine the Rights of Indigenous Nomadic Peoples to Ancestral Land” (Nomadic Peoples, vol. 16, no. 2, 2012): Examines how human rights standards protect nomadic ancestral lands, emphasizing collective rights and remedies in advocacy and litigation.

More recently, my work has increasingly focused on the rights of nature movement, exploring how human rights and ecological justice can be aligned. My current research examines how nature can be recognized as a rights-bearing subject, rather than merely a resource, and how this shift can support stronger environmental protection and more equitable resource governance.

I have led an interdisciplinary UK-funded project, “The Future of the Rights of Nature,” which brings together legal, philosophical, and scientific perspectives to explore how rights of nature could be operationalised in law and policy. For more details see specific page on the rights of nature.