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Environmental defenders and their communities face threats to their lives, liberties, livelihoods, and homes everyday, as their work takes them at odds with big corporate and state interests that value profit over sustainability. Defenders face intimidation, harassment, enforced disappearances, and, at worst, killings, amongst a variety of many more attacks.
The drivers of these attacks are not unknown. These attacks are motivated by the need to silence opposition against mining, quarrying, dam projects, and other destructive projects in order to further economic gains from natural resources, of which local communities get little to no share. They are empowered by local governments, who profit through illicit connections with corporations, which lend local policing and military forces to protect destructive projects and the financial backing of banks and other large financial institutions, who inject them with capital. It is in the interest of these corporations, financial institutions, and connected politicians that local communities who are disadvantaged by these projects are made unable to reach out and form stronger campaigns against destructive projects.
Despite the significant research undertaken into understanding the drivers and forms of attacks against EHRDs, policies aimed at protecting environmental defenders remain non-existent, or if there are, poorly implemented and funded. There is a constant and ever-growing need to strengthen calls for better protection and accountability mechanisms against attacks directed at environmental defenders.
This is why platforms like the United Nations Responsible Business and Human Rights Forum need to be maximized in order to amplify these stories of struggle, not only to get the message out to more people, but as an active way to push back against efforts of repression and build stronger alliances, formulate more comprehensive recommendations and proposals, and strengthen the involvement of non-CSO actors in EHRD defense. The organizations behind this event aim to amplify critical stories of communities affected by dams, mining, agribusiness, and put forward region-wide recommendations, especially with the approaching approval of the ASEAN Environmental Rights Declaration.
A forum by the Asia Pacific Network of Environmental Defenders (APNED), International Rivers (IR), the Coalition for Human Rights and Development (CHRD), Right Energy Partnership (REP), and Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA)
