Country: Honduras

CESCR: Rural women call for justice and an end to eco-destruction in Honduras

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Lily Mejía from FIAN Honduras and a community leader from the Golf of Fonseca region will meet the Committee. They will also participate in an interactive dialogue on the impact of loss and damage from the adverse effects of climate change on the full enjoyment of human rights at the Human Rights Council’s 57th session.  

Rising sea levels and recurring floods

The community leader accompanied by FIAN Honduras is from a small fishing community whose livelihoods and right to food and nutrition have been severely affected by the adverse impacts of climate change and eco-destruction. Rising sea levels and recurring floods are destroying people’s homes and businesses and endangering people’s health and lives. The sea is slowly eating up the village: in some parts, up to 100 meters of coastline have been lost in little more than a decade (see diagnostic on impact of climate change). Extreme weather events are also placing limits on fishers’ ability to go out to the sea to fish, sometimes reducing their catch and income to zero. The community also has to cope with pollution from industrial shrimp farming – an export industry strongly promoted by the Honduran government and operating with little government scrutiny or oversight.

A combination of rising water temperatures and contamination have caused fish stocks to decline, with native fish and clams disappearing entirely or becoming rare. All of this has a dramatic impact on the right to food and nutrition of community members who depend on these for their livelihoods and for subsistence and have few alternatives for income generation. The situation is similar in other coastal communities. As a consequence, many people are emigrating and families are torn apart. 

Government action is urgently needed to protect and support rural communities in the Gulf of Fonseca and other regions of the country in the context of climate change and environmental pollution. Currently, the government is notably absent, with communities left to themselves. In addition to the environmental challenges faced, the communities lack access to natural resources and technical and financial support as small-scale artisanal food producers and small entrepreneurs, while at the same time they face discrimination and exclusion with regard to markets and social protection systems. These and other human rights challenges as well as the proposals by rural communities – and especially rural women – are summarized in FIAN Honduras and FIAN International’s submission to the CESCR for the review of Honduras.

For more information contact Laura Michele: michele@fian.org

Charter Cities and Land Rights

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The adoption of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT) in 2012, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) adopted in 2007, and the 2018 UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) are all significant landmarks in the international recognition of this essentuial right.

Nonetheless, land grabbing, and commodification and accumulation of land through dispossession are an integral and growing part of the global structures that further entrench inequality and hunger worldwide.

The rise of various types of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) have been part of this trend since the 1970s. SEZs are generally accompanied by the promise of human development and poverty reduction. In practice they often become epicenters of land conflicts, linked to increasing land speculation, displacement of communities, and the violation of forest rights.

This FIAN report, What is the right to land in the age of private jurisdictions? provides an overview of the human right to land within the context of the growth of SEZs that strive to establish autonomy from host states or even create private jurisdictions free of any state regulation.

It shows how some of the main promoters of private jurisdictions approach this – taking a closer look at Honduran Development and Employment Zones – and highlights the main contradictions of these models within contemporary understandings of the international human right to land.

Warning cry about the impact of agrotoxics in Latin America and the Caribbean

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Brasilia, Brazil. 28 April 2021. Yesterday, the Latin American sections of FIAN International presented the report Toxic Pesticides in Latin America: Violations of the Right to Adequate and Nutrition at a well-attended online event.

This 108-page publication features data and reports on the impacts of these toxic substances in eight countries across Latin America and the Caribbean: Brazil, Colombia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and Haiti.

The report documents how pesticides affect environmental health and that of humans' as well, as they hinder the full realization of the human right to adequate food and nutrition. It also identifies a widespread pattern in the business strategies of companies in the region which is based on corporate capture of public institutions and territories.

Over 700 participants attended the online release of this report. During the event, Juan Carlos Morales González, from FIAN Colombia, and researcher Leonardo Melgarejo presented the report’s main findings and conclusions. Affected communities in Brazil, Haiti and Paraguay shared their stories about the devastating and destructive effects pesticides have had on their livelihoods. Then, geographer Larissa Bombardi, author of Geography of the Use of Agrochemicals in Brazil and Connections with the European Union, and the UN Special Rapporteur for toxics and human rights, Marcos Orellana, analyzed the results of the report and presented their viewpoints. Rapporteur Orellana clarified:

 “The fact that certain types of pollution are legal does not justify violating human rights … dangerous substances must be eliminated”. He went on to underscore “[the] shared responsibilities of exporting and importing countries…nations’ obligations to prevent exposure to toxic substances are based on human rights”.

As follow-up on the work documented in this report, FIAN International will soon file a complaint with the relevant United Nations special rapporteurs regarding the Brazilian case presented during the online event, in which aerial fumigation was weaponized to evict rural workers from a disputed area in Pernambuco.

On May 5th, another online seminar will showcase this report before a global audience: during which FIAN International will explain the results of a study on the experiences of farmers transitioning towards pesticide-free communities and food systems.

Find out how the discussion unfolded and access the report in Portuguese, Spanish or English, and the executive summary in English

View another webinar  Poisoned Food, Poisoned ecosystems: how people are working towards pesticides free communities

For more information please contact: Ana María Suárez Franco Suarez-franco@fian.org

 

Honduras: The Human Right to Food and Adequate Nutrition

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FIAN Honduras makes available the document it has in its hands with the purpose of contributing to the process of analysis, monitoring and search for alternatives that will help guarantee the right to food in times of crisis or emergency, such as the current COVID 19 pandemic, but with the clarity that states of emergency are constant in our country. Climate variability and climate change keep us facing the impacts expressed in terms of food and job losses every year, and in general, making it impossible to achieve sustainable and fair development that guarantees the full realization of human rights.

Download here (only available in spanish)

Published in May 2020.

Justice for Berta Cáceres, protection for the defense of human rights

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On March 2, 2016, Berta Cáceres, Lenca indigenous leader and coordinator of the Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras (COPINH), was murdered at her residence in La Esperanza, Honduras. According to the information available thus far, even after two years, little progress has been made in the investigation of the case. The public judicial hearings of the eight suspects detained as material perpetrators have been postponed on numerous occasions. The report issued in November 2017 by the International Advisory Group of Experts (GAIPE) revealed a lack of due diligence in the investigations, this includes the lack of processing other possible intellectual authors of the murder.

Berta Cáceres dedicated her life to defending the territorial and cultural rights of indigenous peoples, women, Garífuna peoples and the peasantry. She was recognized nationally and internationally as a defender of human rights and received the Goldman Prize in 2015 for her struggle in defending territory, natural assets and Mother Earth. In the last years leading up to her murder, she was the victim of persecution, intimidation, stigmatization and criminalization both by state and non-state actors, due to her work in the context of opposition to hydroelectric and extractive exploitation imposed on territories without free, prior and informed consent of the indigenous peoples who live there. Since 2009, Berta was a beneficiary of precautionary measures granted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR/CIDH). However, these measures did not protect her from the numerous attacks against her and, ultimately, did not protect her from being assassinated.

The case of Berta reflects a reality faced by defenders in Latin America, who act in favor of the environment and the territory. Another emblematic case is found in Mexico, where on January 15, 2017, Isidro Baldenegro, a well-known indigenous environmental activist who fought against the illegal logging of the old forest of the Sierra Madre Occidental in Tarahumara / Raramuri territory, was killed in Chihuahua. Isidro Baldenegro won the Goldman environmental prize in 2005 and was identified as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International.

Since the murder of Berta, the number of murders of human rights defenders with protection measures provided by the IACHR has increased alarmingly in the region. This situation, coupled with little or no progress in clarifying cases of murdered activists, constitutes a serious attack on the defenders and creates widespread impunity.

Two years after the crime, the EU-LAT Network and CIDSE urge the EU and its Member States to demand that the State of Honduras adopt all necessary measures to ensure that the material and intellectual actors of Berta Cáceres’ murder are duly prosecuted, in line with European commitment on the protection of defending human rights.

*FIAN International is an active member of the EU-LAT

IACHR meets European counterparts at a critical time

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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 

Civil society urges Honduras to take immediate action

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The recent killings of the activists Jose Angel Flores and Silmer Dionisio George  from Unified Peasant Movement of Aguán (MUCA), in Bajo Aguán, as well as the attacks against members of the Civil Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) illustrate the risks that human rights defenders face in Honduras. Intimidation, threats, repression of the freedom of assembly and expression, as well as other factors impacting people’s lives are the daily reality of human rights defenders. This is particularly prevalent when activities put the interests of powerful economic and political actors power “at risk”.

In a letter, together with 170 organizations, FIAN International calls on Honduras to conduct a thorough investigation into these events and put in place measures for the effective protection of those who defend life and human rights.

You can read the letter here  (en español).

Serious human rights situation in Honduras reported to the EU

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The speakers' delegation pays a visit to Brussels to share the recent report by the UPR Platform (Plataforma EPU), presented last week at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, during the 58th session of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. With no very encouraging findings, the report uncovers the situation human rights defenders face for protecting environmental rights and natural resources. As a result of their work and commitment, human rights defenders are subjected to acts of violence, harassment, death threats and assassinations.

The best known case internationally is that of activist Berta Cáceres. Nevertheless, José Gaspar Sánchez, a member of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, (Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras – COPINH), and a member of the Honduran delegation on the current speaking tour, states that “many human rights defenders in the country have lost their lives defending nature, our common heritage, and most of these killings have been carried out by the police and military” thereby directly pointing to the responsibility of the authorities in these events.

Moreover, Gaspar Sanchez adds that “we members of COPINH continue to be kept under permanent siege by the company Desarrollos Energéticos SA (DESA), and repressive state forces. Both the military and employees of this company have been accused of killing Berta”. 

Another defender and member of the tour, Irma Lemus, from the Permanent Human Rights Observatory of Aguán (Observatorio Permanente de Derechos Humanos del Aguán – OPDHA), adds to these allegations by stating that “in Bajo Aguán, those of us who defend our natural resources have been the victims of permanent harassment from justice officials, the very people who should be ensuring that our human rights are respected. I myself suffered a criminalisation process that lasted almost two years. I am only free from this now because the State failed to present any evidence against me”. 

For his part, Marlon Ochoa, Executive Director of FIAN Honduras, reports that this violence is a direct consequence of the dominant model for economic growth, which is supported and sustained by states despite the negative impacts this has on rights and peoples: “The Honduran government actively promotes a development model that violates the economic, social and cultural rights of Honduran communities, particularly those living in rural areas, including indigenous and small farming communities”, he concludes.

The speakers’ visit to the capital of Europe has been supported by the European organizations ACT Alliance EU, CIFCA, FIAN International and Grupo Sur. The Brussels-based organizations recall that some projects in Honduras have investment from European companies or development banks. They also express support to the request by the European Parliament to the European Commission in its recent resolution, urging that European aid does not encourage or allow projects that violate human rights and that free, prior and adequate consultation is carried out with indigenous communities, for all development projects that affect their natural resources.

You can find the report here (in Spanish only)
For more information, please contact morena[at]fian.org