As the Coronavirus pandemic continues the shake the world, it is more important than ever that we build on our spirit of togetherness and resilience.
An 83-year-old Jesuit priest imprisoned in India on accusations of terrorism has been targeted because of his defense of indigenous people's land rights, church and human rights leaders say.
SAO PAULO, Oct 22 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Alessandra Munduruku, a leader of Brazil's Munduruku indigenous community, has seen her home broken into and been threatened over her work defending her people and their Amazon land from illegal miners and loggers, hydropower plants and other threats.
COVID-19 has exacerbated an already deeply alarming regulatory vacuum, which is being exploited by unscrupulous governments and private sector operators to ramp up the destruction of vital indigenous forestlands – this threatens efforts to rebalance humanity’s relationship to nature with indigenous and local voices at its heart.
As the world struggles to deal with the shockwaves created by the Coronavirus pandemic, scientists have been drawing direct links between the emergence of new diseases, collapsing biodiversity and the destruction of vital forestlands which for generations have been stewarded by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.
The residents stated that Nwoko had successfully bought over senior policemen in Delta State and Abuja, who allegedly assisted him in intimidating and arresting those, who opposed his attempt to forcefully acquire additional 90 hectares of land from an area earmarked for all indigenes of the community.
Residents of Idumuje Ugboko community in Delta State have accused former senator, Ned Nwoko, of using the police and Ministry of Justice to dubiously harass, intimidate and lock up elders and sons of the town.
JAKARTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Indonesia has cut back its planned transfer of state forests to local communities this year by half - an area twice the size of Los Angeles - because of the coronavirus outbreak, according to the Ministry of Environment and Forestry.
Bambang Supriyanto, the ministry’s director general of social forestry and environmental partnership, said social distancing measures from March to June had halted the technical work needed on the ground to certify the handover of land.
Concession to extract timber from 148,000 hectares in upper Baram was granted despite repeated objections from local communities.
Main photo: Communities like Long Tungan are working hard to find a way to protect their lands and save some of the most valuable carbon and biodiversity stocks we have left. Photo courtesy of The Borneo Project.
Main photo: Protesters call in Phnom Penh for government authorities to intervene in land-rights disputes, Jan. 13, 2020 (RFA).
Cambodia’s government is unable to resolve the country’s myriad land disputes because many of them involve senior officials, Minister of Interior Sar Kheng said in a rare acknowledgement Tuesday, as a rights group urged authorities to take action against all perpetrators of illegal land grabs equally.
A giant Vietnamese agribusiness company is destroying indigenous land in Cambodia’s Ratanakkiri province, said a joint press release from Equitable Cambodia and Inclusive Development International that was published on Monday.
The human rights groups wrote that many indigenous people in Cambodia’s Ratanakkiri province have been waiting for years for the Vietnamese rubber company, Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL), to finally return their sacred land, as had been promised by a 2015 mediation agreement.