Category Archives: Land rights

Fears for Chilean indigenous leader’s safety after police shooting

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Alberto Curamil, an award-winning environmental activist, was seriously injured during a protest against the burning of a Mapuche home

Former recipients of a prestigious environmental award, together with Amnesty International and the lawyer of indigenous land rights defender Alberto Curamil, have launched an appeal for Curamil’s safety after he was seriously injured in a shooting by police.

Curamil, an indigenous Mapuche leader who in 2019 won the Goldman Environmental Prize (GEP), also known as the “green Nobel”, was left with 18 riot shotgun pellets embedded in his body after police chased his truck and opened fire after a protest against an arson attack on a Mapuche home on contested land in southern Chile.

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‘Where should we go?’: thousands left homeless as Karachi clears waterways

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As Pakistan’s supreme court backs bulldozing of homes blamed for floods, critics say government has no proper plans for residents

Maqsooda Bibi, 62, did not know the house she had lived in all her life would be demolished, forcing her whole family to become homeless. But on Monday, Pakistan’s supreme court backed the Sindh government in bulldozing her home and hundreds of others, legalising the eviction of thousands who live along narrow waterways – nullahs – that crisscross Karachi.

The verdict came as Bibi and hundreds of others held a protest outside the court. “We hoped that the court would ask the government not to make us homeless, but it did the opposite. Our children also protested on Sunday and urged the supreme court to stop demolition. It seems no one here cares for the future of the poor.”

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‘They fired at everyone’: peril of Pakistani villagers protesting giant luxury estate

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Activists were shot and beaten at demonstration to stop property giant Bahria Town building on indigenous land they say was taken with force

Muhammad Anwar was not aware of any danger when he took the day off work to join his friends at a demonstration on a construction site of a powerful real estate company.

When Anwar, 35, reached the west bank of Langeji river, near Karachi, earlier this month, he saw the bulldozers levelling land next to Bahria Town, a luxury gated development.

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Fears growing for five indigenous Garifuna men abducted in Honduras

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The Triunfo de la Cruz region has been embroiled in a struggle to save their ancestral land from developers and drug traffickers

Fears are growing for the safety of five black indigenous men in Honduras who were abducted from their homes last weekend by heavily armed gunmen in police uniforms.

The victims are Garifuna fishermen from the town Triunfo de la Cruz on the north coast – a region where communities are embroiled in a longstanding struggle to save their ancestral land from drug traffickers, palm oil magnates and tourism developers aided by corrupt officials and institutions.

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Scottish villagers plan to buy out landowners for eco moorland project

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Despite funding challenges, community aims to increase biodiversity at Langholm Moor making it resistant to climate change

A small community in the rolling uplands of southern Scotland hopes to create a major new nature reserve, straddling more than 10,000 acres of heather moorland home to hen harriers, black grouse and curlew.

The 2,300 villagers of Langholm, a small settlement a few miles north of the English border, hope to buy one of the UK’s most famous grouse moors, owned by one of the UK’s most powerful hereditary landowners, the Duke of Buccleuch.

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Costa Rican president pledges to protect indigenous rights after activists murdered

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Carlos Alvarado seeks solution that will end conflicts over land despite previous delays

Costa Rica’s president has pledged to protect the rights of indigenous defenders following a spate of violence against native communities in his country.

Last month, an activist, Yehry Rivera, from the Brörán indigenous community in Térraba, Puntarenas province, was shot and killed after he was attacked by an armed mob while trying to reclaim ancestral land. The murder happened just two weeks after an indigenous leader of the Bribri indigenous people in nearby Salitre was shot in a surge of unpunished violence against native communities in Costa Rica.

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Philippines’ war on drugs fuels attacks on land defenders – report

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Study shows martial law in an island territory is also being used as pretext for violence

President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs and declaration of martial law in an island territory are being used as a pretext to attack people defending their land and environment in the Philippines, new research shows.

The resource-rich archipelago in south-east Asia is the world’s most murderous country for people who oppose logging, destructive mining and corrupt agribusiness. At least 30 people were killed in the Philippines last year, following 48 in 2017, dislodging Brazil from the top spot for the first time since the independent watchdog Global Witness began monitoring in 2012.

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Māori land rights leader calls on Jacinda Ardern to recognise Indigenous ‘crisis’

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Activist leading Ihumātao dispute calls on PM to visit site and act on Māori disadvantage

The leader of a major Indigenous land dispute in New Zealand has criticised Jacinda Ardern’s government for its lack of action on confronting systemic Māori disadvantage, and says the Māori nation is in “a state of emergency” and “crisis”.

Hundreds of activists camped out in tents and cars continue to occupy a sliver of land at Ihumātao in South Auckland – land they say is sacred to Māori, but which has been sold to a private developer and slated for private housing.

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Who owns England? – podcast

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It is a simple question with an incredibly complex answer – not even the Land Registry knows the exact ownership of all parts of the country. Guy Shrubsole set out to solve the mystery. Plus Alex Hern on the police’s use of facial recognition technology

For nearly 1,000 years, there has been no comprehensive answer to the question of who owns England. Ever since William the Conqueror ordered the “great survey”, the issue has not been satisfactorily resolved. Even the central body that should know, the Land Registry, can only pin down the ownership of about 80% of the country.

Using creative techniques and old-fashioned detective work, Guy Shrubsole set about solving the mystery. The author and campaigner looked at the prime suspects: royalty, the church, the aristocracy, foreign oligarchs and major companies. He tells Anushka Asthana that although some of the names have changed, we still live in a country recognisable from the middle ages, one in which a small elite owns the majority of the land.

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Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population

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Research by author reveals corporations and aristocrats are the biggest landowners

Half of England is owned by less than 1% of its population, according to new data shared with the Guardian that seeks to penetrate the secrecy that has traditionally surrounded land ownership.

The findings, described as “astonishingly unequal”, suggest that about 25,000 landowners – typically members of the aristocracy and corporations – have control of half of the country.

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Report calls for reform of ‘unhealthy’ land ownership in Scotland

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Commission set up by Scottish government recommends new powers to split monopolies

Scottish land ownership rules must be radically reformed to reverse the concentration of the countryside in the hands of a small number of ultra-wealthy individuals and public bodies, a major review has warned.

The study by the Scottish Land Commission, a government quango, says that in extreme cases where landowners abuse their power they could face compulsory purchase or community buyouts.

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‘It’s worse than the tsunami’: the sea nomad village devastated by fire | Susan Smillie

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When the 2004 tsunami struck, the Moken were saved by their knowledge of the sea. But a catastrophic blaze has exposed authorities’ errors in the rebuilding of their homes

Where stilted huts once stood on the white sand, now there are just charred remains. “This is worse than after the tsunami,” says Hook, a Moken sea nomad surveying the damage fire has wreaked on his former village home in Au Bon Yai bay, Surin island.

After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami destroyed the previous Moken settlement here on Thailand’s Andaman sea, Hook says people were able to recover some belongings. This time, when fire broke out on 3 February this year, nothing was left. Now the community fears for the future as the authorities begin to reconstruct the village in its original design, an unsafe housing model consisting of highly flammable structures, densely packed together. And it has reignited a row about the Moken’s rights to their ancestral lands.

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