Tag Archives: Climate Justice

WORLD RAINFOREST MOVEMENT

Monthly Bulletin – Issue 185 – December 2012

OUR VIEWPOINT: In confronting the climate crisis, what rights should hold precedence?

THE FOCUS OF THIS ISSUE: HUMAN RIGHTS

Peasants: Holders of rights 
A new United Nations resolution implies complete recognition of peasant communities and other rural workers as holders of human rights that must be defended. The resolution represents a landmark victory in the peasant movement struggle against marginalization, extreme poverty, forced evictions, and criminalization when they take action to defend their rights to their land and territory and fight back not only against the appropriation and destruction of ecosystems but also the violation of their human rights as peasants.

MEGAPROJECTS, DEFORESTATION AND VIOLATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS: CASES AND DENOUNCES FROM THE SOUTH

AFRICA

• Oil and Human Rights
  Oil has not only driven global warming, it drives human rights abuses including destroying environments and human lives.
• Liberia: Our future is now – communities gather to discuss oil palm expansion and to repair and prevent human rights violations
  Under the slogan ´Our Future is Now´, more than 15- people from communities inside oil palm concession areas in Liberia gathered between 27 and 29 November in Bopolu City – Gbarpolu County – to discuss the expansion of oil palm plantations in Liberia and the impacts on their livelihoods.
• Sierra Leone: Socfin´s oil palm plantations violating human rights
  Landowners from 36 villages affected by large-scale oil palm plantations of the Belgian Socfin company denounce human rights abuses including harassment, intimidation and the loss of their farmlands.

ASIA

• Indonesia: Oil palm plantations and Industrial “Plantation Forest” (HTI) violate human rights destroying Indigenous People’s Identity 
  Oil palm plantations abolish the right of communities to maintain and manage their forests, leading to the destruction of forests by concessionaires that cannot be controlled by either the government or communities.
• Philippines: The death toll of oil palm and mining
  Amid invasion, dispossession, erosion, killings that make the way for oil palm expansion and mining businesses, women and men in local communities resist.
• Malaysia: Industrial acacia plantations violate and threaten the rights of Indigenous Peoples
  Indigenous communities in Sarawak are affected by the activities of Grand Perfect Sdn. Bhd., a consortium of three companies that promote 150,000 ha of acacia plantations on customary community lands. Five communities defend their land rights and denunciate the impacts of these plantations and urge the government to withdraw the plantation license.
  

LATIN AMERICA

• Brazil: Belo Monte, an illegal and immoral hydroelectric dam project that violates numerous rights
  There are 53 legal actions pending against the Belo Monte project for various irregularities; the social, environmental and indigenous population-related conditions established to minimize its impacts have not been fulfilled; deforestation rates in the region have reached record highs, as have rates of violence and homicide and the cost of living for the local population; health care, education, sanitation, security and other basic services in the region have collapsed. Dozens of civil society organizations from throughout Brazil and abroad are calling on the Brazilian justice system to deal with the many legal actions filed against Belo Monte.
  
  
• Honduras: Bajo Aguán – Cry for the Land: New video denounces rights violations under the exploitative oil palm plantation model 
  In the Bajo Aguán region of Honduras, the oil palm plantation industry violates human rights in the broadest sense: it concentrates land ownership, displaces local populations, criminalizes and violently represses social protest, and denies the most basic rights to thousands of organized peasant families.
• Chile: Mapuche communities reclaim ancestral lands stolen by tree plantation companies 
  A total of 60 families from Lafkenche Mapuche communities have initiated a process for the recovery of 2,000 hectares of their ancestral land, which was being illegally occupied by the plantation company Forestal Mininco, a branch of one of the most powerful business groups in Chile.

PEOPLES IN ACTION

• Senegal: Final declaration of the Family Farms International Forum
• Indonesia: RSPO fails to take action against a company bulldozing ancestral forests and perpetrating human rights abuses
• Laos: Social activist Sombath Somphone is missing
• Statement of Asia Social Movements on Climate Change at the Asia Social Movements Assembly
• Chile: Suspension of work on Pascua Lama mine project
• Ecuador: Ancestral peoples of the mangrove forests attacked and evicted
• Bolivia: Letter from the Pan-Amazonian Peoples

RECOMMENDED

• “Manufacturing Consent”
• “Mining, plantation firms reported for rights abuses”
• “World Summit on Sustainable Forest (-destruction)”
• “Map of Mining Conflicts in Latin America”