An ongoing armed conflict in West Papua between the Indonesian military and the separatist movement finds ordinary Indigenous Peoples caught in the middle, resulting in deaths and violations of their rights.
Racial inequality, the legacy of enslavement and colonialism, flourished in the intensity of the armed conflict and has become even more stark with the pandemic. Afro-Colombians who were forced to move from rural areas to large cities suffer discrimination and social ill-treatment. As traditional politics seems incapable of overcoming the conflict, the national strike is offering a space in which to express their indignation.
Coal mining is destroying the forests of Siberia. Contamination of the taiga and rivers is harming the Shor people, who live from hunting, gathering and fishing. Anyone who stands up to the government and companies in defence of the right to nature suffers threats and harassment.
Peaceful and anonymous protests have broken out simultaneously in hundreds of cities and towns around Colombia. The main protagonists are young people of different origins and backgrounds who have decided to form the mouthpiece for the widespread malaise of a country ravaged by an immutable government that has distanced itself from democracy and created an unprecedented social, economic and political crisis. Although people initially took to the streets in reaction to a regressive tax reform, they have ended up identifying with the collective outcry regardless of their profession, class or ethnicity, demanding an end to violence, corruption, inequality, and a poverty that has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Faced with the magnitude of this mobilization of bodies and minds, it did not take the Colombian government long to demonstrate its authoritarian and repressive nature and, with particular viciousness, it attacked the young people of Cali, in Valle del Cauca department.
4 years ago, the Ogiek people of Kenya won a ground-breaking court case at the African Court for Human and Peoples Rights (ACHPR). The Ogiek People is an indigenous hunter/gatherer people who have for many years suffered from human rights violations and evictions from their ancestral land in the Mau Forest in western Kenya.
IWGIA - International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs - is a global human rights organisation dedicated to promoting, protecting and defending indigenous peoples’ rights. Read more.
IWGIA's global report, the Indigenous World, provides an update of the current situation for indigenous peoples worldwide. Read The Indigenous World.
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