Abstract
Access to justice in environmental matters remains a critical yet fraught institutional guarantee for indigenous and peasant communities affected by large-scale extractive operations in the Global South. This study presents a comprehensive empirical assessment of the accessibility, efficacy, and structural adequacy of state-provided legal aid provisions for mining-affected communities in Peru. Utilizing a mixed-methods socio-legal research design, we analyzed 142 judicial and administrative case dockets from 2018 to 2023 across three major mining corridors—Cusco, Apurímac, and Cajamarca—supplemented by 38 semi-structured interviews with community leaders, public defenders from the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights (MINJUSDH), judges, and civil society legal practitioners. The findings reveal severe systemic deficits: over 82% of public legal aid allocations are reserved for criminal defense, leaving environmental, civil, and administrative grievances almost entirely unaddressed by the state apparatus. Furthermore, significant technical capacity gaps in environmental law, pervasive linguistic barriers for Quechua-speaking litigants, and geographic centralization severely undermine effective legal representation. Consequently, affected populations remain almost entirely reliant on resource-constrained non-governmental organizations to litigate complex environmental torts and constitutional enforcement actions. The article concludes by proposing concrete legislative and institutional reforms to operationalize the environmental justice mandates of the Escazú Agreement within the Peruvian legal framework.
