This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online and APTN.
When around 70,000 Indigenous Maasai were driven from their lands in northern Tanzania in 2022, it did not happen in a vacuum. For years, the Tanzanian government has systematically attacked and imprisoned Maasai communities Masai leaders and land defenders on fraudulent charges, confiscation of livestockuse deadly violenceand claims that the Maasai’s pastoral lifestyle causing environmental degradation—a lifestyle that has formed and sustained the land on which the Maasai have lived for centuries. This increase in criminalization, particularly in light of mining, development and conservation, is noted in indigenous communities around the world and has been the key focus of a report released this week at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Affairs, or UNPFII, the largest gathering of indigenous activists, policy makers and leaders in the world.
“This is a very serious concern because the indigenous people who resisted the takeover of their lands and territories, they are the ones who face most of these charges and criminalization,” Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, former special rapporteur on rights of the United Nations. of Indigenous Peoples told a packed panel on the subject on Tuesday. “There is a need to focus on criminalization because it is what brings fear to indigenous communities and it is also what limits them in their ability to assert their right to self-determination.”
The report “Criminalization of Indigenous Peoples’ Human Rights” outlines the mechanisms by which Indigenous peoples around the world increasingly face criminalization and violations of their rights with impunity. Indigenous land, livelihood and governance rights are often poorly implemented if at all, leading to violations when they intersect with government and third-party interests, particularly in extractive industries and conservation. In addition to historical discrimination, a lack of access to justice for holders of indigenous rights – including environmental and human rights defenders, journalists and communities – leads to higher rates of arrest and incarceration. The report provides recommendations for UN bodies, states and other relevant actors to better address this growing threat.
The use of criminal law to punish and deter people from protesting or speaking out is typically the way people understand criminalization, said Fergus Mackay, a senior legal and policy adviser at Indigenous Peoples Rights International, an organization that works to defenders of the rights of indigenous peoples, said. . But most of the criminalization that indigenous peoples face actually stems from the insufficient recognition or non-recognition of their rights by governments. “The lack of recognition of indigenous rights in national legal frameworks is at the heart of this issue,” Mackay said.
This is particularly common when those rights intersect with public or protected lands, or areas that overlap with mining interests, conservation, or climate mitigation measures. For example in Canada, First Nations Fishermen are arrested and harassed by federal fisheries officials for fishing rights protected by treaty. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the indigenous Baka people were beaten, imprisoned and prevented from using their customary forest by eco-guards hired to protect wildlife. A 2018 study estimated this more than a quarter of a million Indigenous peoples have been evicted due to carbon offset schemes, tourism and other activities leading to the creation of protected areas.
“The criminalization of indigenous people can also be seen as the criminalization of the exercise of indigenous rights,” said Naw Ei Ei Min, a member of Myanmar’s indigenous Karen people and an expert UNPFII member at Tuesday’s panel.
Slander and smear campaigns through social media are often used in the run-up to false criminal charges, especially when indigenous people speak out against state-backed private companies investing in large-scale projects on their traditional lands, Tauli-Corpuz said. Berta Cárceresthe well-known Indigenous Lenca environmentalist who opposed the development of the Agua Zarca dam in Honduras was previously detained on trumped-up charges of land use, coercion and possession of an illegal firearm before she was murdered in 2016. Tauli-Corpuz, the former Special Rapporteur, along with about 30 other indigenous leaders, is himself on a terrorist list in 2018 by the Philippine government, a move that was heavily criticized by the UN.
Criminalization has serious consequences. In 2021, of the 200 land and environmental defenders killed worldwide more than 40 percent were indigenous. According to Indigenous Peoples Rights International, an organization founded in part to address growing concerns about the criminalization of indigenous peoples, despite representing only 6% of the world’s population, indigenous defenders have suffered almost 20% of attacks between 2015 and 2022 and were much more likely to experience violent attacks.
The UN report also pointed to the high rates of incarceration of Indigenous people, and their disproportionate risk of arrest. In Canada, dozens of members of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, who have long protested the creation of the Coastal GasLink pipeline that will cross their unincorporated territory, have been arrested and are awaiting trial in Canada. This trial is currently being held due to allegations of excessive violence and harassment of the police.
In countries such as New Zealand and Australia, indigenous peoples are already massively overrepresented in prisons. In Australia, despite making up only 3% of the population, Aboriginal Australians to almost 30% of the prison population. “It really speaks to the racism and discrimination that exists, which is the basis for filing the criminalization cases against them,” Tauli-Corpuz said.
Indigenous journalists are included in this year’s report because they are increasingly at risk of criminalisation. In 2020 Anastasia Mejía Tiriquiz, a Guatemalan Kʼicheʼ Maya journalist was arrested and charged with sedition after reporting on a demonstration against the municipal government. And just this year, Brandi Morin, an award-winning Cree/Iroquois/French journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta was arrested while covering an Indigenous-led homeless camp in Edmonton.
Indigenous peoples are also affected by the increasing use of criminal law to deter free speech and protests. Since the indigenous-led protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock reservation in 2016 legislators in two dozen states in the US have taken up bills increasing fines for pipeline protesters. Globally, laws targeting everything from anti-terrorism, national security and free speech only add to the ability for states to bring criminal charges against indigenous activists.
Olnar Ortiz Bolívar, an indigenous Baré lawyer from Venezuela who works to defend the rights of indigenous communities, has been the target of both physical violence and harassment for his work in the Amazon, an area where illegal miners, criminal organizations and the government is. competition for control of resources, especially gold. He was a outspoken critic from the government-designated mining area in southern Venezuela known as the Orinoco Mining Arc. Now he fears that a new bill passed by the Maduro regime in Congresswhich effectively turns anti-government dissent and protest into a criminal act will seriously affect his ability to continue to speak out against such projects.
“It’s a contradiction because we have rights in theory, but we don’t have the right to practice them,” he said. “What they are doing is taking away the freedom of expression of Venezuelans and, apparently, of the indigenous people, who are increasingly vulnerable.”
As countries seek to meet their goals of protecting 30% of their lands and water by 2030 along with growing demand for transition minerals, criminalization of indigenous peoples is likely to grow, experts say. A survey of more than 5000 existing “energy transition mineral” projects found that more than half were located on or near indigenous peoples’ lands; for unmined deposits that figure was much higher.
The report outlined a series of recommendations to counter criminalization, emphasizing the importance of revising national laws, improving measures to protect indigenous human rights defenders and access to justice, and promoting efforts to combat criminalization and the prevent, reverse and correct its consequences.
