By Chris Lang In May 2017, the Ogiek Indigenous People won an important land rights victory at the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The Court ruled that the Ogiek have the right to live in the Mau Forest and that the government of Kenya was wrong to evict them. At the end of…
Tag: Indigenous Peoples
Forced evictions in the name of conservation: 28 Sengwer homes burned in Kenya
By Chris Lang On 11 May 2020, Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary, Ministry of Interior and Coordination of National Government, Fred Matiangi’i, issued a moratorium on forced evictions during the coronavirus pandemic. He made the announcement on national television. On 10 July 2020, Kenya Forest Service guards burned down 28 homes belonging to Sengwer Indigenous People in…
Blood REDD: How Chile’s brutal repression of Indigenous Peoples and the plantation industry’s land grab under the Pinochet dictatorship are to be rewarded by the World Bank
By Chris Lang Two companies, Forestal Mininco SpA and Forestal Arauco S.A., together have almost two million hectares of industrial tree plantations in Chile. The companies grabbed most of the land for the plantations during the dictatorship of Augustus Pinochet from 1973 to 1990.
Indigenous Batwa prisoners were arrested on their ancestral lands in the Kahuzi-Biéga National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo
By Chris Lang When the Kahuzi-Biéga National Park was established in the 1970s in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, about 6,000 Indigenous Batwa people were evicted. For more than 40 years the Batwa have struggled to have their rights recognised. The Batwa communities around the park have no land, and find it difficult to earn…
REDD in Colombia: Continued deforestation and extractivist development
By Chris Lang “The greatest issue, or challenge, of our time is climate change,” Iván Duque, president of Colombia, said in Davos at the 2020 World Economic Forum. “So if we really want to as a society be able to contain the effects of climate change, we need to protect the tropical forests.”