Officials from 24 Latin American and Caribbean states have signed a legally binding environmental rights pact containing measures to protect land defenders, almost two years to the day since environmental leader Berta Cáceres was killed in her home in Honduras.
Last year almost 200 nature protectors were killed across the world, 60% of them in Latin America. The new treaty obliges states to “guarantee a safe and enabling environment for persons, groups and organisations that promote and defend human rights in environmental matters”.
It compels strong measures to protect national environmental defenders from threats or attack – and investigate and punish these whenever they occur. And it codifies the rights of environmental defenders “to life, personal integrity, freedom of opinion and expression, peaceful assembly and association, and free movement.”
The 2016 killing of Cáceres, a winner of the Goldman environmental prize, focused attention on the killings of environmental and land rights activists in the region. Her death was one of 14 such deaths recorded in Honduras that year in a collaboration between the Guardian and NGO Global Witness, making the country one of the deadliest in the world for environmental activists. In a sign of progress, though, the number of killings fell in 2017 and two days before the new pact was agreed, Honduran authorities arrested a former military intelligence officer for masterminding Cáceres’s killing.
Source:
theguardian
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