Indigenous land defenders face rising threats amid global push for critical minerals

Yahoo

2 days ago

Miguel Guimaraes, a Shipibo-Konibo leader, has spent his life protesting palm oil plantations and other agribusiness ventures exploiting the Amazon rainforest in his homeland of Peru. Last spring, as he attended a United Nations conference on protecting human rights defenders in Chile, masked men broke into his home, stole his belongings and set the place on fire. Guimarares returned days later to find 'He will not live' spraypainted on the wall.
The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders, Mary Lawlor, denounced the attack and urged Peru to guarantee Guimarare's protection. Although Guimaraes enjoyed international support, his assailants haven't been identified.
Guimaraes is one of 6,400 activists who endured harassment or violence for defending human rights against corporate interests. That's according to a new report from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre that chronicles attacks and civil violations human rights defenders worldwide have experienced over the past decade. Although Indigenous peoples make up 6 percent of the world population, they accounted for one-fifth of the crimes documented in the report. They also were more likely than others to be killed, particularly in Brazil, the Philippines, and Mexico.
Some of these attacks arise from the 'range of ways' governments are restricting civic space and discourse and 'prioritizing economic profit,' said Christen Dobson, an author of the report and co-head of the Civic Freedoms and Human Rights Defenders Programme. 'Over the past 10 years we've seen a consistent, sustained pattern of attacks against people who speak out against business-related human rights, risks, and harms,' he said.
People like Guimaraes experience a wide variety of harassment, including judicial intimidation, physical violence, death threats, and killings. Most abuse stems from defenders raising concerns about the social and environmental harm industrial development brings to their communities and land. (More than three-quarters of all cases involve environmental defenders, and 96 percent of the Indigenous people included in the report were advocating for environmental and land issues.) The majority are tied to increased geopolitical tensions, a crackdown on freedom of speech, and the global minerals race, the report found.
Most of these attacks are reported by local organizations focused on documenting and collecting Indigenous cases, and the number of crimes against them may be higher. 'The only reason we know about even a slice of the scale of attacks against defenders worldwide is because defenders themselves are sharing that information, often at great risk,' said Dobson.
Virtually every industry has a case in the database that the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre maintains. The organization has tracked companies, trade associations, and governments believed to have requested that, or paid to have, law enforcement intervene in peaceful protest activity. In 2023, for example, local authorities in Oaxaca, Mexico attacked and injured members of the Union of Indigenous Communities of the Northern Zone of the Isthmus who were peacefully blocking the Mogoñe Viejo-Vixidu railway which posed a threat to 12 Indigenous communities in the area.
The protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline saw the highest number of attacks related to a single project over the last decade, the report found. Around 100,000
in 2016 and 2017 to oppose the pipeline, and were met with a campaign of harassment, intimidation, and arrest. Energy Transfer, the company that led the project, filed a defamation suit accusing Greenpeace of violating trespassing and defamation laws and coordinating the protests. In March, a jury ordered Greenpeace to pay $660 million in damages, a verdict legal experts called 'wildly punitive.'
The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre cites that lawsuit as an example of companies using a legal tactic called a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP suit, to silence dissent and harass protestors. But Energy Transfer cited that courtroom victory in its response to the nonprofit's report: 'The recent verdict against Greenpeace was also a win for the people of North Dakota who had to live through the daily harassment and disruptions caused by the protestors who were funded and trained by Greenpeace.'
Fossil fuel companies were hardly the only offenders, however. Dobson and her team identified several cases involving renewable energy sectors, where projects have been linked to nearly 365 cases of harassment and more than 100 killings of human rights defenders.
But mining, including the extraction of 'transition minerals,' leads every sector in attacks on defenders. Forty percent of those killed in such crimes were Indigenous, a reflection of the fact that more than half of all critical minerals lie in or near Indigenous land.
The outsized scale of harassment and violence against Indigenous people prompted the UN Special Rapporteur to release a statement last year making clear that, 'A just transition to green energy must support Indigenous Peoples in securing their collective land rights and self-determination over their territories, which play a vital role in biodiversity conservation and climate change adaptation.'
Businesses, particularly those in mining and metals, are being pressured to ensure their operations do just that. The Consolidated Mining Standard Initiative, or CSMI, for example, is a voluntary framework to improve industry policies adopted by several trade associations like the Mining Association of Canada. 'The standard addresses a broad range of community risks by requiring mining operations to work with communities to identify and work together to mitigate risks faced by the community,' the association said. 'Such risks include those to human rights defenders, where they exist.'
Another member of the initiative, the International Council of Mining and Metals, said it has 'strengthened our member commitments on human rights defenders to explicitly include defenders in companies' due diligence, stakeholder engagement, and security processes. Defenders often work on issues related to land, the environment, and indigenous peoples' rights.'
Even as this report highlights the dangers human rights defenders face, a growing need for critical minerals, mounting demand for the infrastructure to support AI, and the dismantling of regulatory oversight in the United States bring new threats. The report also makes clear that these attacks will not decrease until broad agreements to adopt and implement protections for these activists are enacted. Such policies must be accompanied by legislation designating Indigenous stewardship of their land and requiring their involvement in project consultations.
Yet Indigenous organizations tend to doubt any industry can be trusted to voluntarily participate in such efforts. In a letter sent to the CSMI, 25 human rights organizations including the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre said mandatory participation will be required to ensure robust protection of human rights defenders and relationships between industry and Indigenous peoples. 'People and the environment suffer when companies are left to self-regulate with weak voluntary standards,' the letter stated.
Still, change is coming, however slowly. When Dobson and her team started tracking the harassment and violence against human rights defenders, she wasn't aware of any companies with a policy pledging to not contribute to or assist attacks against defenders. Since then, 'we've tracked 51 companies that have made this policy commitment,' she said. 'Unfortunately that doesn't always mean we see progress in terms of implementation of those policies.'
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous land defenders face rising threats amid global push for critical minerals on Jun 2, 2025.