When Sacred Land Meets the Law: Stories of Legal Resistance from Nepal and Colombia

Written on 20 January 2026. Posted in News

BY LIESELOTTE VIAENE & SABIN NINGLEKHU FOR INDIGENOUS DEBATES

A four-way, transcontinental collaboration, this essay tells the stories of Indigenous communities in Nepal and Colombia resisting the destruction of sacred lands at the hands of war and development, highlighting how law, spirituality, and activism intersect in the fight for justice.

The Communist Party of Nepal – Maoists, the United Marxist Leninists, and the Nepali Congress – together represent the “old guard” that has dominated Nepali politics for more than three decades. September 8 and 9, 2025, will be permanently marked in the history books as the Gen Z uprising that finally brought down this “old guard”. Sparked by a government ban on social media and harsh cyber laws, the movement’s core demand was an end to systemic corruption. Seventy-two people, mostly youths, lost their lives, and hundreds were injured.

Amid the chaos, several homes of political leaders, including the prime minister’s, were torched as he and the home minister resigned. Many parliamentarians went missing for days. Iconic sites such as the Parliament and Supreme Court were also burned down. Although an interim government, formed after talks with Gen Z leaders, is slowly restoring services, the judiciary remains paralyzed—thousands of legal documents were destroyed, including several writ petitions filed by the Indigenous communities of Nepal.

One of these petitions is against a cable car project on a sacred mountain that the Indigenous Limbu community have historically identified as Mukkumlung, renamed about a century ago as Pathibhara, after a Hindu goddess. In more recent decades, Pathibhara has become a popular religious site for Hindu pilgrims. Mukkumlung forms part of the ancestral Limbu territory and is a sensitive geographic region as it borders Tibet (China) and Sikkim (India). It is also geologically sensitive as it forms part of the Himalayan formation, one of the most biodiverse ecological zones. To safeguard it, the Nepal government declared this zone as the Kanchenjunga Conservation Area Project in 1997.    

Development and green transition vs Indigenous sacred sites?

“I don’t think we should give up our sacred lands for the sake of development. We are not even going to give up our community forest, let alone our temples, shrines, and sacred spaces,”says Sarita Ghale of Khasur village, in Northern Nepal, in the short documentary Marsyangdi Wile Ri’iba: May you live as long as the river. The film explores the tensions between Indigenous ancestral wisdom, the agency of land’s invisible guardians and the relentless force of ‘progress’ driving Nepal’s hydropower economy. The Gurung language title is a blessing from the elders to the younger generation: “(…) may you live as long as the Simal tree, may you be as strong as the rocks in the Marsyangdi river”.

This short film forms part of the Twin documentary project “Human rights beyond the human?”, produced as part of the six-year interdisciplinary RIVERS research project (2019-2026), funded by the European Research Council (ERC). RIVERS examines the relationship between humans and nature and the role of law through fieldwork in Nepal, Colombia, Guatemala and the United Nations.  It’s Colombian twin, Aty Seikuinduwa: A Judge Between Worlds, follows the spiritual and legal journey of Indigenous Judge Belkis Izquierdo. This intimate portrayal of Aty Seikuinduwa, Judge Belkis’ spiritual name, meaning “mother beyond the darkness”, shows how she brings the living land, multiple life systems, and Indigenous spiritual practices into the courtroom.

Together, these two films challenge the dominant legal frameworks by foregrounding more-than-human voices and Indigenous jurisprudence, offering a powerful reflection on legal pluralism, spiritualism and resistance to extractivism. Overlapping with the concerns these documentaries raise, the cable car project exemplifies the latest onslaught of ‘development’ against sacred land. Registered under ‘Pathibhara Devi Darshan Private Limited’, a private company led by a Nepali billionaire, this 21-million USD project would connect the base of the mountain with its top, flying over the pilgrimage trail that currently snakes its way through the hilly forest, claiming acres of forest.

The company claims that this cable car would ease the pilgrims’ commute while boosting tourism and creating jobs, so ‘bringing development’ to Taplejung district. In such claims, what the Nepali government endorsing the project, and the private company constructing it, do not reveal is what would be lost in the process – a complete erasure of Limbu culture and destruction of nature through the ‘Disneyfication’ of the sacred land as resorts, cafes, hotels and a skating zone, all of which are planned for construction on top of the sacred site.

Bureaucratic and legal violence

As part of the post-war peace process following the end of Nepal’s decade-long ‘People’s War’ in 2006, the country ratified International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (1989) and endorsed the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007. These human rights instruments recognize Indigenous Peoples as collective-rights holders, including the right to self-determination, land, territory, and natural resources, and establish the right of FPIC – Free, Prior, Informed Consultation and Consent over decisions affecting their rights.

Initially, Nepal was hailed as a regional leader in Indigenous rights protection. It was the first Asian country to ratify ILO Convention 169 and, in its 2015 Constitution, explicitly recognized Indigenous Peoples’ rights.  The country also ratified the 1978 World Heritage Convention, and the 2010 Convention on Intangible Heritage; articles 26 and 34 of its Constitution furthermore protect communities’ rights to preserve religious sites and cultural practices.

Almost 20 years later, Nepal’s leadership has proved to be a false dawn. A recent report “Hanging by a Thread: Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Renewable Energy Transition”, published by Accountability Council and Lawyers’ Association of Human Rights of Nepali Indigenous Peoples, documents how multilateral development banks and the Nepalese government systematically fail to uphold Indigenous rights, including FPIC, in major hydropower projects.

Besides destroying sacred sites, the Nepal government, in endorsing the cable car project, has approved the cutting down of thousands of trees, destroying the habitat of threatened animal species and, in the process, dismantling the very reason why it created the Kanchenjunga Conservation Area Project in the first place. More recently, this has morphed into full-blown violence meted out against the peaceful community protestors. The armed police force has been deployed  to aggressively clamp down on protests, throwing tear gas canisters inside private houses in the middle of the night, destroying surveillance cameras, putting people behind bars, physically assaulting and opening fire on the protestors, and severely wounding people, while filing cases against the protestors for ‘creating unrest’.

Knowledge that comes from the territories

Nepal is now forging much-needed reforms on many fronts. Amid state-induced violence, the legal future of Mukkumlung rests in the hands of Nepal’s Supreme Court – which is currently literally rising from its ashes. Could this High Court finally transform Nepal’s leadership in Indigenous Peoples’ rights protection on paper into progressive jurisprudence, allowing the Limbu sacred mountain to win its legal battle? 

The innovative Indigenous jurisprudence of Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace may offer new legal pathways for Nepal’s court cases on harm to Indigenous lands from development and green transition projects. Since its 1991 Constitution recognized ethnic and cultural diversity, Colombia has built a strong body of multicultural jurisprudence. Yet it was only in 2014 that the judiciary appointed its first Indigenous assistant magistrate, Belkis Izquierdo Torres—a historic milestone. Four years later, she became one of the 31 judges of the Peace Tribunal, alongside three other Indigenous judges.

Created as part of the 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP), the JEP investigates and prosecutes cases linked to the armed conflict, which disproportionately affected Indigenous and Afro communities. These groups secured the inclusion of the Agreement’s late-added Ethnic Chapter, guaranteeing recognition of their rights and territories within the transitional justice process. In line with its victim-centered mandate, this tribunal has elaborated a participatory territorial based investigation methodology.

As Judge Belkis Izquierdo explains in the short film: ” [Judges] need to get out of the confines of the office a little … to feel, to smell the Territory. …. Our [Indigenous] knowledge comes not only from human reason; it comes from the Territories because knowledge is territorialized.”  The idea that land itself can be a bearer of legal knowledge stands in stark contrast to Nepal’s jurisprudence on Indigenous rights.  The judge adds: “To recognize the Territory as a victim means acknowledging it is alive, that it is a sentient being, that it is a subject of rights. That, within the context of the armed conflict, it has suffered, it has been damaged, and it is still in pain. And that it needs to have a voice in the judicial process so that this harm can be acknowledged and repaired.”

Could Nepal’s Supreme Court set a legal benchmark in South Asia?

This marks a significant legal milestone: it is now recognized that it is not only human beings, but also sacred sites, spiritual beings and their interrelationships that can suffer harm. Indigenous territories in Colombia are thus accorded rights to truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-repetition— rights previously reserved for individuals and groups affected by armed conflict.

In a similar vein, Nepal’s Supreme Court could consider an in-situ visit or a fact-finding mission to Mukkumlung to directly assess the territorial disputes and alleged violations. Over the past decade, the  Inter-American Court of Human Rights and several Latin American high courts have conducted similar visits to Indigenous and Afro communities, gathering additional evidence and hearing all parties involved. The Inter-American Court’s first in-situ visit took place in 2012 in the emblematic case Pueblo Indígena Kichwa de Sarayaku v. Ecuador, where the judges traveled by plane and canoe to hold proceedings within the Amazonian community’s territory. Since then, this regional Court has carried out 15 in-situ visits, six of them to Indigenous communities across Latin America.

Even though the Indigenous communities in Nepal remain skeptical about their country’s judicial system – often perceiving a structural bias against Indigenous cases – there a few alternatives but to turn to the national courts. The state has shown no political will to upholds its international human rights obligations. Indicatively, during a hearing in the Supreme Court in May 2025 on the cable car project, a company lawyer dismissed Indigenous claims over the sacred land by saying: “It is like listening to fiction and poetry … their argument belongs in the stone age”. The irony, one could argue, lies in how much such racist remarks sound archaic when compared to innovative legal practices, such as in Colombia, where a plurality of knowledge systems is integrated into environmental and Indigenous litigation.

As Shree Linkhim, one of the young Indigenous leaders of the #NoCableCar movement reflected in a private conversation: “When you think of it, this [the Indigenous movement] really goes beyond cancelling cable cars and hydropower projects. At the heart of it all, the struggle is really about pushing to transform the character of the Nepali state.” Easier said than done, but that is their resolve. If Indigenous movements worldwide are understood as a permanent struggle and resistance, the historic ruling in Colombia under Judge Belkis represents a monumental moment to which Nepal might aspire. Whether it ever gets there will depend on how the character and practice of the Nepali state and judiciary evolve in the wake of the Gen Z uprising and the upcoming 2026 elections that promise to reshape the country’s political landscape.

Lieselotte Viaene is a Belgian-Flemish legal and environmental anthropologist and Senior Fellow at the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University, Belgium. She is the Principal Investigator of the project RIVERS – Water/Human Rights Beyond the Human? and the Executive producer of the RIVERS Twin documentary.

Sabin Ninglekhu is an Indigenous human geographer currently leading an international project entitled 'Heritage as Placemaking: The Politics of Erasure and Solidarity in South Asia'. He is based at Social Science Baha in Kathmandu, Nepal and is an editor of the recently launched multimedia platform “the commons” on social sciences and humanities in Nepal. Sabin has been collaborating with the #NoCableCar Indigenous movement in Nepal since 2023.

Cover photo: Forest protectors of the Khasur community (Lamjung District) and protagonists of the Nepal short documentary. Foto: ERC RIVERS project

Tags: Indigenous Debates