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FIAN International Launches Annual Report 2025: Supporting Communities Worldwide that Resist Hunger, Inequality, and Corporate Control

Posted on by Amanda Cordova Gonzales

FIAN International Annual Report 2025 is out!

FIAN International has launched its 2025 Annual Report, highlighting how communities across the globe are defending the right to food amid deepening inequality, climate breakdown, corporate concentration, conflict, and shrinking democratic space.

Our report reaffirms that food systems have become key battlegrounds for justice and democracy. Through initiatives such as Supermarket Watch, FIAN and its partners exposed how corporate concentration shapes markets and undermines livelihoods. Advocacy at the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), the FAO, and international human rights forums has pushed for more democratic and human rights-based food governance.

A major focus of the report is the growing concentration of land and natural resources. FIAN’s landmark publication Lords of the Land documents how the world’s ten largest transnational landowners control an area comparable to Japan, exposing the links between land grabbing, environmental destruction, and inequality. The report contributed to global debates on agrarian reform and redistributive justice ahead of ICARRD+20.

The Annual Report also highlights feminist and decolonial approaches to food sovereignty. Across Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, FIAN supported feminist political education initiatives and collective organizing by rural and Indigenous women, strengthening leadership, participation, and human rights-based action in contexts shaped by conflict, patriarchy, and extractivism.

Another central theme is the defense of fishing communities’ rights. In collaboration with global fishing movements, FIAN amplified community voices in international policy spaces and documented how climate change, industrial aquaculture, and the so-called “Blue Economy” threaten coastal livelihoods and food security.

Regional chapters showcase concrete struggles and achievements worldwide. In Africa, FIAN Burkina Faso and civil society allies successfully secured the termination of the controversial Target Malaria Project after nearly a decade of advocacy, while FIAN Uganda continued supporting fishing communities in their struggle for fairer fisheries governance.

In Asia, FIAN Indonesia documented the harmful impacts of top-down food and land policies, including failures in the government’s school meal program and land dispossession linked to the Food Estate Program. In Sri Lanka, FIAN worked alongside street vendors—particularly women—to strengthen legal recognition, improve protections, and defend livelihoods against forced evictions.

In Europe, FIAN Germany, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland sections contributed to advance momentum around a European Citizens’ Initiative on the right to food, promoted agroecology and food justice policies, and supported legal and advocacy efforts linking climate justice, intergenerational justice, and corporate accountability.

In Latin America, FIAN accompanied landmark struggles for land, Indigenous territories, and food sovereignty. This included legal victories for peasant land rights in Colombia and Ecuador, support for artisanal fishing communities in Honduras, and advocacy for Indigenous territorial demarcation and culturally appropriate school feeding programs in Brazil.

The report also underscores FIAN’s ongoing work to strengthen agroecology as a pathway toward just transitions, support human rights defenders facing criminalization and violence, and advance a binding UN treaty on transnational corporations and human rights.

“In a world marked by deepening injustices, communities continue to resist, organize, and rebuild,” the report states. “Standing in solidarity with these movements is essential to building just, sustainable, and democratic food systems for all.”

The full FIAN International 2025 Annual Report is available here

Safeguarding the Hands That Feed Us for a Better Future for All 

Posted on by Amanda Cordova Gonzales

Elisabeth Jost, FIAN Austria; Naomi Reinschmidt, ÖBV- Vía Campesina Austria; Ana María Suárez Franco, FIAN International  

Worldwide, agricultural land is controlled by the largest 1% of giant industrial-scale farms. In the EU, an estimated 1,000 farms close every day. Roughly 9.1 million people currently active in agriculture will retire within the next decade.  Wars and conflicts displace entire populations, destroy and contaminate the territories that rural communities and Indigenous Peoples dedicate to produce food, causing and exacerbating famine and starvation.  

The way land is cultivated today will determine whether tomorrow’s generations inherit healthy soil, clean water, biodiversity, and vital rural communities. The rights of peasants and Indigenous Peoples are therefore not only a matter of the present, but  are also central to intra- and intergenerational justice and the human rights of future generations.  

Young People Struggle to Farm   

Young people face major structural barriers to farming, with access to and control over land as the most critical.  Concentration and speculation push prices beyond reach, especially for those who cannot inherit. Growing competition for agricultural land – from investors, energy production, and large infrastructure projects – squeezes agriculture, particularly small-scale and family farming, out of the landscape.  Powerful retailers and corporate actors impose prices that do not cover production costs, extracting value from farmers and making full-time farming economically impossible, forcing many into precarious part-time work or debt.  Rising costs for oil and fertilizers intensified by war, land concentration and speculation further deepen existing inequalities, especially for small food producers.  

The education system makes problems worse. In many countries, agroecological training is scarce. Cooperatives and collectively run farms face administrative hurdles and lack structural support. Political participation is too often symbolic: young farmers have few meaningful channels to co-decide policy. Women and gender diverse people face oppression through patriarchal inheritance systems, structural discrimination, and the systemic invisibilisation of unpaid care work. In contexts of war, occupation or conflict, those resisting– navigating trauma and subordinated to disrupted or colonized administration- face even larger challenges and carry increased burdens of care and survival. 

Land and territories, Knowledge, and the Human Rights of Future Generations  

The consequences are intergenerational. Land, water and forests cannot be treated as speculative assets because their fertility, ecology, biodiversity and social function unfold over generations. The rights to land and water, as recognized in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), are intergenerational rights. When current oppressive systems dismantle peasant, fisher, pastoralist, and Indigenous food systems, they leave future generations with depleted soils, destroyed biodiversity, fragmented knowledge systems, and corporate-controlled seed and land markets- undermining their ability to realize their right to food. 

Agroecological farms and other local food systems, by contrast, are pioneers for climate resilience and care for nature. They store carbon, regenerate soil, enhance biodiversity, and buffer the impacts of extreme weather. Losing them is not only a social loss; it is a blow to climate adaptation and to the right of future generations to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. Protecting peasants, rural communities, and Indigenous Peoples today, means safeguarding ecological cycles, seed diversity, and knowledge that cannot be rebuilt from one generation to the next. 

The Right to Food Is the Right to Decide  

Realizing the right to food requires a political transformation to overcome injustices and redistribute power, ensuring the conditions that people need to practice agroecology and achieve food sovereignty. Ecological, social, and political dimensions are deeply intertwined: justice and peace, the right to land, seeds, a fair income and self-determination lie at the heart of any sustainable future.  

Peasant rights, as recognized in UNDROP, provide a normative compass for this transformation. They stand in opposition to violence and to the dominant industrial food regime, which concentrates power, displaces rural communities, pushes farmers into debt, and shifts responsibility for ending hunger away from States and toward corporations. Governments must fulfill their obligations to protect, respect, and fulfil the right to food and all connected rights through public policies that serve people.  

That means reshaping land governance with anti-speculative laws, capping land concentration, ensuring liability for land grabbers, and building public land funds for newcomers – guided by common-good and public interest criteria. Land should be in the hands of those who work and nurture it and feed the world.   

This means acting on these urgent issues: 

  • Fair incomes are critical. Prices must cover production costs. Public support should prioritize peasant farms and local small food producers over agribusiness and retailer dominance.  
  • Social protection must include all farmers, fishers, pastoralists, and workers, including seasonal and informal labor. Care work, predominantly carried out by women, must be made visible, recognized, valued and redistributed.  
  • Agricultural policy, like the European CAP, needs a reset. It must move away from per-hectare payments that penalize small farms and ignore newcomers and instead design policies accessible to all and reward agroecological practices and the provision of public goods.  
  • Knowledge is a public good. We need agroecological education embedded in territories, such as farmer-to-farmer learning, and mentoring that passes on the skills and wisdom built over decades.   
  • Democracy must be real. Young farmers need genuine co-decision space and women and gender-diverse people need targeted pathways into leadership free from fear and discrimination.  
  • Local markets should be strengthened to keep value in communities and reduce export dependency, while engaging globally for fair, solidarity-based trade.   
  • In situations of war and conflict, seeds and traditional knowledge must be safeguarded for the reconstruction of disrupted food systems. Weaponization of food, water, and land must end! …Wars must stop!  

Listen to and protect the growing youth movement in farming and in other rural constituencies. Their message is clear: defend land and territories as a common good, invest in agroecology, and open doors for those who want to farm.  The rights of future generations begin with the rights of rural communities and Indigenous Peoples today. Respect their life!  

For more information, please contact FIAN International Secretary General Ana Maria Suarez Franco suarez-franco@fian.org, Elisabeth Jost, FIAN Austria elisabeth.jost@fian.at; or Naomi Reinschmidt, ÖBV- Vía Campesina Austria.  naomi.reinschmidt@viacampesina.at 

Nyéléni Process: Rethinking global trade in a time of geopolitical tensions

Posted on by Amanda Cordova Gonzales

For much of this century, the multilateral system established after World War II has been corrupted and hijacked by a cohort of wealthy, powerful nations that are reshaping the (so-called) global rules-based order and redefining what cooperation, justice, shared prosperity and stability are. Leading the charge is the United States of America, which, through the combined power of capital and military might, is bypassing collective rules and imposing unilateral decisions that are fundamentally reshaping global politics and trade. This has led to a fragile international system where all rules are changeable and brute power determines outcomes.

This is not to say that the besieged international/multilateral system is fair, equitable or democratic. Its foremost bodies—the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO)—have long been instruments to advance the interests of former colonial powers. The bitter irony nowadays is that even the rules imposed by these institutions are in disarray.

Global trade and investment—whether negotiated through WTO agreements, bilateral Free Trade Agreements or Strategic Economic Partnerships—have morphed into weapons in geopolitical conflicts. Tariffs, sanctions, and financial restrictions are wielded not to correct trade imbalances but to exert ruthless political pressure and vanquish nations and peoples. Economic measures target those who dare to chart any alternate path to global capitalism and fascist ideologies.

As the latest war in West Asia shows, these actions ripple far beyond the nations involved. For developing countries, the consequences are devastating. Fluctuating tariffs, aggressive sanctions, and volatile commodity prices threaten working-class livelihoods, strain food systems, and deepen dependence on increasingly unreliable external markets.

Small-scale producers and workers—the backbone of local economies—find themselves caught in a vice of global price swings, escalating production costs and decreasing incomes.

When economic policies are driven by imperial and settler colonial ambitions, the expectation of fair and equitable trade evaporates. Cuba, Palestine, and Venezuela illustrate how trade weaponization combined with colonial assertions leads to the collective punishment of peoples.

However, this moment of crisis also offers a critical opportunity. As faith in existing systems wanes, countries and social movements are rising to demand a renewal of genuine multilateralism—one based on cooperation rather than oppression, and on participatory democracy rather than opaque representation.   

Focus on the Global South, La Via Campesina

Read complete here, or downlad here

Public food programmes are a powerful tool for food sovereignty, if done right

Posted on by Amanda Cordova Gonzales

Every year, governments spend more than US$84 billion on national school meal programmes, with 99% of this funding coming directly from domestic budgets. Such public food procurement and distribution schemes, which buy and provide food to schools, public hospitals, care homes or prisons, represent a significant portion of the overall market for food sales.

By sourcing from agroecological farms, local food hubs, and small enterprises, public food programmes can support community kitchens while ensuring decent livelihoods for small-scale producers and distributors, including street and market vendors, and other marginalised groups. They can also provide people, particularly those most in need, with fresh, culturally appropriate, nutritious food. These initiatives can greatly improve public health and uplift the local economy. Plus, they can create a space for community involvement, bringing together parents, students, local producers, officials, and health professionals to co-design programmes.

Public food sourcing also has the potential to positively influence eating practices while sustaining local food cultures. Through thoughtful menu designs, schools and other institutions can procure local fruits and vegetables without blowing their budgets, all while creating a space for collective learning on why short distance food supply matters. The programmes can even address supply chain issues, for example, working with food providers to use plant-based materials, like banana leaf, instead of plastic packaging.

Unfortunately, the potential benefits of public food programmes are often stifled by the way they are designed and implemented. Top-down, centralised public food programmes lead to corruption and nepotism and favour powerful agri-food companies. Public food programmes often rely on pre-made, ultra-processed foods because of convenience, which suppresses the demand for fresh, local ingredients. Furthermore, public tender contracts involve extensive paperwork and strict audits to prove accountability, which can make it difficult for smaller local suppliers to participate.

To unlock the true potential of public food programmes, we must view food as a vital public good, building on already existing local food sourcing networks–from small-scale producers, to informal food vendors, to consumers. A decentralised procurement system is key – one where local governments play a central role and beneficiary communities have a direct say in the programme’s design and implementation.

Some public food programmes are leading the way in this direction. In Brazil, civil society successfully pushed for the passage of a recently enacted law that increases from 30 to 45 percent the amount of the national school meal budget that has to be spent on family farms practising agroecological methods, prioritising Indigenous, Quilombola, agrarian reform settlement, and women producers. In May 2025, the Philippines’ municipality of Nueva Vizcaya launched the Healthy Public Food Procurement Ordinance, which promotes whole, nutritious foods by partnering with local fishers and farmers.

In this edition, we look at the importance of involving street and market vendors in public procurement and at the challenges faced by two public food programmes that underline the importance of decentralisation and diversity: Indonesia’s free meals programme for children and India’s public procurement system.

Read here

Banner: Quezon City, Philippines. 28th July, 2018. Children queue during a feeding program community service event. Alamy

Seeing Everything from Nowhere: A Human Rights Assessment of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s Data Governance

Posted on by Amanda Cordova Gonzales

The case study, Seeing Everything from Nowhere: A Human Rights Assessment of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s Data Governance, evaluates whether FAO’s digital initiatives, particularly its digital public goods (DPGs) and digital public infrastructure (DPI), uphold equity, transparency, and participatory decision-making in agri-food systems. The analysis reveals significant gaps in FAO’s current data governance model.

A central concern is FAO’s growing dependence on US-based technology corporations for cloud services and digital infrastructure. The research also highlights how FAO’s DPGs and DPIs fail to meet key public interest criteria. The study concludes with concrete recommendations to align FAO’s digital transformation with human rights and public interest principles and food sovereignty.

Read the executive summary here.

Read the full case study here.

Time to act: Securing a sustainable future through corporate accountability

Posted on by Amanda Cordova Gonzales

In spite of an increasingly robust international human rights and environmental legal framework, when it comes to trade and investment agreements, transnational corporations are often granted rights that are stronger than local communities’ tenure and human rights, without including any corporate obligations, especially their obligations to respect and comply with remedies.

In the briefing paper “Time to Act: Securing a Sustainable Future through Corporate Accountability” FIAN and other organisations address the challenge to ensure that growing recognition of the RtHE across governance spaces is translated into enforceable and coherent obligations for states and corporations alike. The paper outlines how the UN legally binding instrument on transnational corporations (TNCs) and human rights can contribute to close that gap with binding regulation of corporate conduct to prevent harm and secure access to justice and remedy in transnational contexts.


“The Treaty on TNCs and Human Rights can play a pivotal role in operationalizing states’ obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, for example by reinforcing meaningful participation, Free, Prior and Informed Consent, and robust environmental, gender and human rights impact assessments” says Ayushi Kalyan, corporate accountability coordinator at FIAN International. ”Such provisions would enable and require States to take timely action to modify, suspend, halt or refrain from trade, investment, or concession agreements that threaten livelihoods, contaminate land and water, undermine biodiversity, or contribute to climate change.”

The paper highlights multiple examples how corporate operations are causing severe environmental pollution in water, air, and soil, damage to local agriculture, expropriation and displacement of communities, etc. It  refers to recent developments in international jurisprudence which have clarified States’ duties to regulate private actors, enforce compliance, and ensure effective remedies – especially the Advisory Opinion (AO) of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the obligations of states in respect to climate change  and the Advisory Opinion (AO) of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) on climate emergency and human rights.

It concludes with a set of recommendations

  • to States:

-Constructively participate and strengthen the Updated Draft of the legally binding instrument on transnational corporations and human rights by ensuring that it establishes clear obligations for corporations and states, liability across jurisdictions, and effective remedies for affected communities; 
-Integrate into domestic law stringent human rights due diligence, liability and other prevention mechanisms grounded in the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment

  • to intergovernmental and UN bodies

-ensure that environmental policies genuinely reflect and serve the needs and priorities of those most impacted by environmental degradation and ensure coordination between human rights and environmental governance processes in line with the most progressive standards for protection.  

  • to civil society including trade unions

-Center the voices of grassroots communities and social movements as essential actors and promote community-led and people-centered solutions to the ecological crisis;
-Leverage the language of the legally binding instrument and jurisprudence on the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment in environmental justice advocacy, and share information about this instrument in relevant spaces.

For more information, please contact Sabine Pabst pabst@fian.org

IPC releases its position paper on agrarian reform ahead ICARRD+20

Posted on by Tom

Twenty years after the first ICARRD, land, water, forests and oceans are increasingly concentrated in the hands of corporations and financial actors, driving dispossession, inequality and ecological collapse. Small-scale food producers, Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists, fishers, rural women and workers continue to be excluded from their territories and decision-making spaces.

The IPC urges governments to move beyond voluntary commitments and adopt binding, measurable actions to ensure redistributive land reform, equitable access to natural resources, democratic governance, and agroecological rural development. Without secure collective rights to land and territories, there can be no food sovereignty, no just transition, and no lasting peace. At ICARRD+20, IPC brings forward a clear political vision to reclaim land and dignity worldwide.

Download here

Global Social movements rally around ICARRD+20 as struggles over land, natural commons, and territories intensify

Posted on by Tom

From Palestine to Venezuela, from Cuba to the Arctic, a renewed imperial scramble for territory, minerals, water, and energy is underway. Financial investments, military occupation, economic blockades, and so-called security, development, and green transition projects are increasingly used by governments, corporations and elites to dispossess peoples and grab power over strategic resources. As a result, the world is witnessing escalating land concentration, the dispossession of territories, natural commons, and growing inequality. As global social movements of small-scale food producers, we are determined to unite in Cartagena to expose how these global power struggles directly impact rural and urban working-class communities and to fight for public policies that respect our rights and autonomy.

As a result of this capitalist and imperialist expansion, the global food system is also in deep crisis. It is collapsing under climate breakdown, industrial monocultures, and extreme inequality. We, the peasants, Indigenous Peoples, and small-scale food producers who feed most of the world and protect ecosystems, are facing a new wave of dispossession driven by militarisation, big technology, organised crime and the commercialisation of climate action.

We, representatives of social movements from over 70 countries, organized through the International Planning Committee on Food Sovereignty (IPC), and attending ICARRD+20 as part of the Common Political Action Agenda emerging from the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum, call on the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) to establish robust, participatory, and regular assessment mechanisms to monitor the implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT).The UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) must be central pillars of comprehensive agrarian reforms, guiding states to protect collective rights, ensure participation, uphold free, prior and informed consent, and defend territories against dispossession.

ICARRD+20, which will take place from 24 to 28 February 2026, comes twenty years after the first conference in Porto Alegre. In the intervening decades, land concentration has intensified and new forms of land and water grabbing have expanded. As social movements, we insist that the conference must move beyond technical recommendations and voluntary pledges.

We are calling for comprehensive agrarian reform grounded in four pillars: recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ and customary rights over land, territories and water; redistribution of land and natural commons, including limits on corporate and military accumulation; restitution for communities dispossessed by land grabbing, colonialism, occupation, and conflict; and strong regulation of land markets to protect food-producing territories from extractive, speculative, and military uses.

A comprehensive agrarian reform is central to democracy, peace, and climate justice. Any meaningful agrarian reform must centre women’s equal land rights, secure dignified futures for rural youth, and recognise the rights, safety, and belonging of sexually diverse and gender-diverse people in rural territories. Without political commitments and effective global monitoring and cooperation mechanisms, land grabbing simply takes new forms.

Our struggle for agrarian reform today is inseparable from our fight against imperialism, authoritarianism, and ecological collapse. ICARRD+20 is a critical moment to intensify our united efforts to reclaim land, territories, restore dignity to rural peoples, build food sovereignty, and defend the foundations of life itself. As the IPC Working Group on Land, Forests, Water, and Territories, we will organize a Social Movements and Indigenous Peoples Forum on February 22 and 23 to prepare our collective proposals for the Conference.

Defending Life, Building Food Sovereignty!

People’s Control over Land, Water and Territories, NOW!

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FOR PRESS

  • List of Global Social Movements: LVC, IITC, WFFP, WFF, WAMIP, WMW, FIMARC, MIJARC, HIC, URGENCI
  • List of Regional Social Movements: AFSA, CAOI, COPROFAM, ECMIA, MAELA, PROPAC, ROPPA, USFSA
  • Key Dates
    • Social Movement Forum: 22–23 February 2026
    • Academic Forum: 20–22 February 2026
    • Official ICARRD+20 Conference: 24–28 February 2026
    • Press Conference: To be confirmed (virtual or Cartagena)

3rd Nyéléni forum: Building global solidarity for systemic transformation

Posted on by Tom

From 6 to 13 September 2025, the city of Kandy in Sri Lanka hosted the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum. Small-scale food producers, consumers, Indigenous Peoples, trade unions, human rights defenders, climate and health justice advocates, urban poor communities, women and gender-diverse groups, practitioners of the social and solidarity economy, scholars, artists and other representatives from grassroots movements and civil society organizations gathered at the National Institute of Co-operative Development. Together, they built a Common Political Action Agenda (CPAA) for systemic transformation towards economic, social, gender, racial and environmental justice.

Over the years, the Nyéléni process has enabled collective movement building, offering a space where grassroots movements share struggles, analyse trends, and work together toward common solutions. Building on the legacies of the first and second Nyéléni fora, both held in Mali, this third forum expanded its reach by joining forces with the climate justice, people’s health, and social solidarity economy movements.

Reflecting its diversity, the forum brought together participants from all regions of the world, with a team of 72 volunteer interpreters organised by the collective COATI, working tirelessly to ensure language justice and interpretation into 18 official languages.

At its core, the forum reaffirmed that food sovereignty is inseparable from global solidarity. From Palestine to Congo, from Haiti to Sudan and beyond, participants voiced their commitment to resist oppression in all its forms and to build a world rooted in dignity, justice, and care. Standing with Palestine — and with all peoples facing occupation, war, and dispossession— was recognized as a shared responsibility and a reflection of the movement’s collective vision of justice.

The forum culminated in the acclamation of the Kandy declaration and the anticipation of an enriched CPAA, both intended to serve as a political compass guiding the actions and vision of movements worldwide striving for food sovereignty and justice.

This edition of the Nyéléni newsletter shares a selection of the forum’s highlights, capturing several of the participants’ perspectives. As the Kandy declaration states: “Across all the diversities we represent—to strengthen our struggles – we are raising our voices together, declaring: Systemic Transformation—Now and Forever!”

IPC for Food Sovereignty, Transnational Institute (TNI)    

Illustration: Mural created by the Fearless Collective during the 3rd Nyéléni Forum in Kandy, Sri Lanka.

Click here to download the English editionNyeleni_Newsletter_Num_62_EN (pdf) or read it directly on the website!          

For any further information, contact info@nyeleni.org – www.nyeleni.org

On the International Human Rights Day, we demand a transformation of the UN that strengthens accountability and serves peoples not budgets

Posted on by Tom

In our work with communities affected by human rights violations, people often tell us that visits and recommendations by the Human Rights Council’s Special Procedures – such as the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food – and recommendations by Treaty Bodies bring visibility to the risks and harms they face, guide states in preventing or redressing those harms, and ensure accountability for obligations under the UN Human Rights treaties.

While the Human Rights System has failed to stop genocides and other grave atrocities, the work of Special Procedures and Treaty Bodies- carried out by independent experts serving without pay – has played out a decisive role in correcting injustices, and stands out as one of the most important parts of the system for human rights holders.

Despite this reality, the UN80 reform (UN80 Initiative) threatens to reduce budgets essential to ensure the work of the human rights mandates, including by cutting the technical support provided by the OHCHR that is necessary to respond to letters of allegations from rights holders, prepare affidavits, and conduct other critical monitoring work. The UN human rights pillar is already severely underfunded, receiving only about 1% of the total UN budget, and the proposed cuts would once again disproportionately impact human rights work – further weakening protection for those most at risk. We are concerned because mergers of mandates that are essential have already begun and the reduced number of country visits introduced in 2025 has been announced to continue unchanged in 2026, with only one visit planned. Furthermore, while the work of these mandates is mainly based in Geneva, the decisions are taken by the UN General Assembly in New York, through a very opaque process, without due consultation with a diverse group of civil society and affected communities or even the concerned human rights mandate holders.

“The UN’s credibility and legitimacy have already been seriously questioned due to its failure to stop the genocide in Gaza, the many abuses by transnational corporations and the destruction of our nature. Further weakening the human rights mandates would deepen the crisis of legitimacy. We need a transformation of the UN that puts people and planet at the center and strengthens those mechanisms that serve the people, not a rushed, cost-cutting reform that superficially treats the symptoms while leaving the structural causes untouched” says Sibyle Dirren, permanent representative of FIAN in Geneva.

We call on all UN member states to pay their contributions to the UN and to actively defend the full and uninterrupted functioning of Special Procedures and Treaty Bodies. Members who have committed to respect, protect and fulfill human rights, shall ensure that any reform guarantees accountability, access to justice, and effective remedy. A reform that is done with the people serving the system without pay, the Special Rapporteurs and the members of treaty bodies, and those they are mandated to defend, the human rights holders. We call on civil society to unite and raise their voices for a real transformation of the UN.

Contact person: Sibylle Dirren, dirren@fian.org