Country: Chile

No profit without accountability: recognising the right to a healthy environment

Posted on by Tom

Communities around the world are affected by unchecked and unregulated transnational corporate power, leading to poisoned water supplies, lost farmland, destroyed food systems and lost livelihoods. Yet, too often, corporations escape accountability while communities are left without remedy or justice, as outlined in a new study focusing on environmental issues, No Profit Without Accountability – For People and the Planet, aimed at shaping UN discussions.

The upcoming session of the Human Rights Council’s open-ended intergovernmental working group in October 2025 – the eleventh annual round of discussions – has enormous potential for curbing excessive corporate power and protecting communities and the environment. States will be negotiating the final articles of the updated draft of the legally binding instrument(LBI) to regulate transnational corporations in international human rights law. FIAN and other international civil society groups insist that the LBI must include an explicit recognition of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment and integrate this right – along with broader environmental and climate change considerations – throughout its substantive provisions.

“It’s very simple. If the LBI does not include strong environmental protections, it will fail the very communities it is meant to protect,” says Ayushi Kalyan, corporate accountability coordinator at FIAN International.

Enforceable international standards

Communities and human rights and environmental defenders have long campaigned for this addition to international human rights law.

In Latin America, families are still fighting for justice decades after Sweden’s Boliden Mineral dumped toxic waste in Arica, Chile, causing widespread health problems for people living near the dump site. In Palestine, corporations like Heidelberg Materials are alleged to have contributed to the pillaging of natural resources from occupied land. Across Africa and Asia, extractive projects are dispossessing Indigenous Peoples and rural communities of their territories and food systems. Each case highlights the urgent need for clear, enforceable international standards that prioritize human rights and environmental protection over corporate profit.

The International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights have both affirmed states’ obligations to regulate private actors and prevent transboundary environmental harm. More than 80 percent of UN member states already legally recognize the right to a healthy environment.

“The LBI must explicitly recognize the right to a healthy environment, protect defenders from reprisals, and ensure that victims have real access to justice,” says Stephan Backes, extraterritorial obligations coordinator at FIAN International. 

Close the gap

Negotiators now have the responsibility to close the gap at the global level by embedding this right in the heart of the LBI.

The study released today proposes concrete legal texts to states to strengthen the provisions in the LBI, ensuring, among other things, that it includes environmental due diligence, precautionary measures, and the primacy of human rights and environmental obligations over trade and investment agreements. States should carefully consider and integrate these recommendations in their submissions during the next round of negotiations in October and continue leveraging these proposals in their ongoing advocacy in relevant national, regional and international spaces and processes.

As the world edges closer to climate collapse, this LBI process is a critical opportunity to hold corporations accountable. States must not squander it.

For more information, please contact Ayushi Kalyan Kalyan@fian.org or Stephan Backes Backes@fian.org,

Global land grab highlights growing inequality

Posted on by fredsaxo

Massive tracts of land in the Global South are being bought up by international investors and ultra-rich corporations, fueling growing inequality – part of a wider global trend of wealth transfers away from the poor and working people.

The report from FIAN International and Focus on the Global South, Lords of the Land: Transnational Landowners, Inequality and the Case for Redistribution, puts the spotlight on the world’s ten largest transnational landowners – who together control 404,457 km², an area the size of Japan.

This is part of a global land rush. Since 2000, corporations and financial investors have acquired an estimated 65 million hectares of land – twice the size of Germany. Today, 70 percent of global farmland is controlled by the largest 1 percent of giant industrial-scale farms.

Forced displacements

This concentration has grave implications for food security, threatening the livelihoods of 2.5 billion smallholder farmers and 1.4 billion of the world’s poorest people, most of whom rely on agriculture for survival. It is also driving violence, forced evictions, and environmental destruction while also contributing significantly to climate change.

Virtually all the top global landowners named in the report have been implicated in reports of forced displacements, environmental destruction, and violence against communities.

One of the main players is the US pension fund TIAA, which has acquired 61,000 hectares in Brazil’s Cerrado region, one of the world’s most biodiverse areas. In the Cerrado, approximately half of the land has been converted into tree plantations, large agro-industrial monocultures, and pastures for cattle production — amid reports of violent land grabs, deforestation and environmental destruction which already shows signs of impacting the climate.

TIAA almost quadrupled its global landholdings between 2012 and 2023 — from 328,200 hectares to 1.2 million hectares.

Inequality

Land concentration undermines state sovereignty and peoples’ self-determination, with distant corporations controlling vast tracts of land across multiple jurisdictions.

The industrial-scale monocropping, often carried out on this land, is a major driver of climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem destruction, preventing just transitions to more equitable and sustainable food systems and economic models.

These developments reflect a broader global trend of rising inequality and wealth concentration. Since the mid-1990s, the richest 1% of the world’s population has captured 38% of all additional accumulated wealth, while the poorest 50% have received only 2%.  An estimated 3.6 billion people, or 44% of the world population, now live on less than US$ 6.85 a day, below the threshold for a dignified life.

Because land grabbing is largely driven by global capital and the accumulation of land across jurisdictions by transnational corporations and financial entities, international cooperation is essential. The upcoming International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20) in Colombia early next year offers a critical opportunity for governments to agree on measures that end land grabbing, reverse land concentration, and ensure broad and sustainable distribution of natural resources.

In a world facing intersecting crises – from climate breakdown and food insecurity to entrenched poverty and social inequality – and amid reconfiguration of the global balance of power, now is the time to move away from neoliberal policies that have benefited very few, and to create a more just and sustainable global future for all.

Watch an expert panel discussion on the report here:

For more information or media interviews please contact Anisa Widyasari anisa@focusweb.org or Tom Sullivan sullivan@fian.org.

Coal Power Ecological Destruction in the Western Balkans

Posted on by fredsaxo

The Western Balkans has some of Europe‘s highest air pollution levels. Both countries source most of their energy from fossil fuels, especially domestically produced coal, with little regard for its impact on local communities.  

A recent expansion has been funded by controversial Chinese-backed investments, often without environmental impact assessments and despite China’s commitment to cease funding coal power.

This has exposed local communities and farmers to pollution, land erosion and loss of livelihood.

Many have fought for years to be re-located or fairly compensated. They have lost their land and livelihoods, seen their houses and farm buildings crumble around them and their health deteriorate.

In a new report Coal Power Ecological Destruction in the Western Balkans FIAN International and local civil society groups highlight the harm inflicted by coal power and call for justice for affected communities and for Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to phase out coal power in line with their international human rights obligations, the Paris Agreement, and the Green Agenda for the Western Balkans. 

The report was compiled with the Center for Ecology and Sustainable Development (Centar za ekologiju i održivi razvoj, CEKOR) in Serbia, the Center for Environment (Centar za životnu sredinu, CZZS), and the Aarhus Center (Aarhus Centar) in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

English full report, Executive Summary, and Key Recommendations.

Serbian full report, Executive Summary, and Key Recommendations. 

Bosnian full report, Executive Summary, and Key Recommendations. 

IACHR meets European counterparts at a critical time

Posted on by fredsaxo

The Executive Secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) – Organization of American States (OAS), Paulo Abrão will cross the Atlantic to meet his European counterparts this week.

A series of high-level meetings will be held with EU and EU Members States officials as well as international CSOs, which have been supporting both politically and financially the inter-American system, particularly during last year’s financial crisis.

Abrão will also take the opportunity to present its recently approved Strategic Plan, which various CSOs contributed to, including FIAN International’s section in Ecuador on behalf of all FIAN entities.

Need for real commitment

In a context where States and the private sector (particularly transnational corporations) are increasingly pushing for voluntary guidelines to take over internationally binding human rights instruments and standards, it is crucial to genuinely reinforce the political and legal role of regional human rights systems. This is particularly imperative for OAS Member States that have progressively been withdrawing their financial and political support to the IACHR, thereby leading the latter to its worst crisis in history. 

The lack of political commitment by OAS States is also reflected on some of their sponsored candidates, whose competences are questionable, for the two seats that the 47 Regular Session of the OAS General Assembly will choose in June. The 163rd Period of IACHR Sessions in July will also see the appointment of the first rapporteur on economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, which could suppose a positive change for communities across the Americas. 

Guarani and Kaiowá, seeking justice in IACHR

The Inter-American system is crucial for fighting injustice and structural inequalities against most marginalized groups, especially indigenous communities. This is the case of the indigenous peoples Guarani and Kaiowá in Brazil, who have been facing evictions and violence throughout their struggle for the right to ancestral territory as well as to food and nutrition, and whose situation has only worsened following the Parliamentarian coup d´état.

Last December, the Guarani and Kaiowá’s great assembly Aty Guasu, with the support of CIMI, FIAN International and its Brazilian section, as well as Justicia Global, filed a petition to the IACHR against the State of Brazil. Not only this petition will contribute to further developing standards on the right to food and nutrition in connection with the right to ancestral territory, but also to the IAHRC rapporteurship on economic, social, cultural and environmental rights.

FIAN International hopes that OAS Member States strengthen and prioritize their political and financial support to the IACHR. In addition, this should be reflected on the dialogue and cooperation between the EU and its Member States with the OAS, as regional systems are a crucial element for the development and implementation of the EU Guidelines on Human Rights Defenders and EU Action Plans on Human Rights.  

The organization will engage in the IACHR visit, together with the European CSOs network CIFCA to keep supporting the consolidation of regional human rights systems. 

For more information, please contact castaneda-flores[at]fian.org 
For media enquiries please contact delrey[at]fian.org 

A billion people need fully functioning IACHR

Posted on by fredsaxo

Last Monday, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) broke the astonishing news about its financial crisis. The Commission announced that 40 percent of its personnel will not be renewed beyond July and that its 159th and 160th sessions will be suspended, unless it receives funds or the commitment for donations before June 15. Such drastic changes would have a serious impact on its ability to fulfill its mandate and carry out its basic functions, thereby risking the human rights protection of the billion people living in the Americas.

Reacting to the news, several NGOs from all over the world has issued an Open Letter whereby it appeals to all member states of the Organization of American States (OAS) to take the necessary measures to ensure the immediate and adequate funding of IACHR.

FIAN International recalls that the Inter-American Human Rights system is the result of people’s struggles in the Americas. They delegated their sovereignty to the States to create a system that ensures protection against abuse and injustice. Therefore,  it is the obligation of OAS member states to ensure sustainable financial fund for the Commission to remain fully operational as last resort against violations of fundamental rights in the continent and an international reference for its great efforts in protecting thousands of affected people and communities.

You can read the Open Letter here.