Environmental defenders

In a context of strengthening international expectations that countries adopt national policy frameworks for the protection of environmental defenders, assessing the degree to which existing legal, institutional, and enforcement mechanisms are adequate for ensuring meaningful protection has become an urgent task. Which policy domains require the most pressing and sustained attention to support such defenders? How are responsibilities allocated across the institutional landscape?The analysis indicates that effective protection cannot rely on isolated legal interventions and regulatory frameworks alone; rather, it requires coherent, preventive, and adequately resourced policy frameworks that build on general human rights defenders standards, but also reflect the specificities of environmental defence. These include rural and collective dimensions of risk; sensitivity to intersectionality, especially involving gender and ethnicity; and heightened exposure of individuals and groups situated in socio-environmental conflict settings.

Este documento fue presentado, como respuesta a la S. Opinion Consultiva Colombia Chile, la opinión presentadas por la Licda.  Ellis ante la CIDH con el fin de promover la participación académica y social ante los organismos internacionales, en defensa de los derechos humanos.

Popular culture increasingly engages with climate change and ecological crises, impacting public perception. In Brazil, television, streaming, and film have notably engaged with societal trends. This article examines the first season of a limited series, Aruanas (2019-2021), a Brazilian ecomelodrama featuring four female environmental advocates confronting Amazonian extractivism. Produced by Globo TV in response to far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro's attacks on environmental activists and NGOs, Aruanas aims to raise environmental awareness and inspire action among viewers. The series, created in collaboration with environmental NGOs, has received critical acclaim and commercial success. Through a qualitative close reading, this article explores how Aruanas intertwines ecomedia and ecopedagogy, demonstrating how melodramatic storytelling can effectively engage audiences and address governmental hostility towards environmental activism.

Two pressing and overlapping marine policy issues are related to human rights in the ocean and the situation of ocean defenders. Human rights issues and violations are on the rise in the ocean due to the ongoing, rapid and unchecked escalation of anthropogenic activities in marine and coastal environments, which increasingly undermine the fundamental, civil and political, economic, social, cultural or environmental rights of individuals and groups. In this context, it is essential to recognize, support and safeguard the individuals, groups or communities who are mobilizing, advocating or taking action to protect the marine environment, coastal and oceanic territories, and associated human rights from existential threats. Yet, these 'ocean defenders' often face marginalization, intimidation, criminalization, threats, violence and murders. The failure to protect the human rights of coastal populations and ocean defenders needs to be urgently rectified by states, the private sector and civil society. We identify six specific areas of urgent action to protect human rights in and related to marine and coastal environments and to support and safeguard ocean defenders. KEYWORDS ocean defenders, environmental defenders, human rights, environmental human rights, ocean governance, environmental justice, blue economy, ocean economy Human rights are a foundational norm and global standard for a just society that values human well-being for all people. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR), which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, explicitly recognized a set of fundamental rights (e.g., life, liberty and security of the person, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom from discrimination, freedom of movement, Frontiers in Marine Science frontiersin.org 01

Welcome to the new home of Commodity Frontiers! Thanks to the work of Simon Bouvier, Antoine Gelgon, and Lionel Maes at those.tools in Brussels, we are thrilled to share Issue 7 on our new, bespoke, open source website. With great care over the past several months, our friends at those.tools developed this platform to meet our unique needs as a volunteer-run, open-access, collaborative journal that aims to serve academic and extra-academic communities. On the publication side, their custom tools greatly reduce the labor of publication, from encoding to design to generating downloadable files. On the reading side, the fully scrollable articles create a more enjoyable and dynamic reading experience, allowing for easy onscreen viewing as well as one-click pdf downloads. Readers can also search the journal's contents by issue, keyword, contributor, and category using the search function on the upper right. In the coming months, we will work to encode issues 1-6 onto the new site so that the entire corpus of Commodity Frontiers is easily accessible and searchable. The journal is now hosted by Brussels-based tactic, an organization that since 2002, "has been supporting associations and activist collectives in the adoption of free, ethical and sustainable tools, in a logic of emancipation and collective and citizen appropriation of digital technologies." We are happy to join Tactic asbl as collaborators, a connection we made through those.tools. We are grateful to the Gerda Henkel Foundation for funds that contributed to the new website design, and to the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam for sponsoring our web hosting fees. For now, our site, commodityfrontiers.com also remains active. And now onto the issue at hand: Carbon Frontiers. In this issue, we're talking carbon. Carbon frontiers, carbon histories, carbon technocracy, carbon sovereignty, carbon financing, carbon credits, carbon offsets, carbon capture and storage, carbon conflicts. Oliver Ressler's film, Carbon and Captivity, critiques the shortcomings of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology itself. In a conversation with editorial collective member, Marjolijn Dijkman, Ressler discusses his work on the Technology Centre Mongstad, the world's largest testing facility for industrial-scale carbon capture technology located in Norway. An artist and filmmaker, Ressler's work of-ten intersects with activism on social, political, and environmental issues like climate breakdown. He highlights the contradictions and fallacies of "sustainable" extractivism and the geoengineering projects that support it, urging instead a move to truly clean forms of energy. Special Section: Zijin The issue ends with a special contribution by Joan Martinez-Alier and Marcel Llavero-Pasquina. Following previous work from the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas), their article examines conflicts involving the transnational metal mining company, Zijin, across all continents. As a leading firm in terms of sales, profits, and tonnage mined, their analysis of Zijin draws much needed attention to the socio-environmental liabilities of this global giant.

A principios del año 2023, la Corte IDH dio a conocer su sentencia en el caso Baraona Bray c. Chile. El presente comentario explica la relevancia de esta decisión en dos ámbitos, la defensa ambiental y la libertad de expresión de cara a la protección de la honra de los funcionarios públicos. En la primera parte, se desarrolla el concepto de defensores del medio ambiente, como una categoría específica de defensores de derechos humanos y como una función reconocida en recientes instrumentos internacionales sobre participación pública en asuntos ambientales. La segunda parte aborda las proyecciones de la sentencia con relación a la tensión entre la libertad de expresión y la tutela penal del honor de las autoridades públicas. En particular, se analiza la metodología que propone la Corte IDH en sustitución de decisiones anteriores y su opción por considerar que la despenalización es la vía adecuada para resguardar la libertad de expresión frente a los funcionarios públicos.

El presente capítulo tiene como objetivo exponer la situación crítica que enfrentan las personas defensoras de derechos humanos (DDH) día a día en Centroamérica. Esto se logró a partir de un minucioso análisis de las estadísticas presentadas en informes o reportes anuales de las orga- nizaciones del norte global Front Line Defenders y Global Witness sobre los asesinatos de personas DDH en nuestra región, y la corroboración de otras fuentes: páginas web de organizaciones de defensa de derechos humanos, periódicos digitales, redes sociales y activistas. Esta investiga- ción es un subproducto del proyecto académico llamado Investigación Diagnóstica para la Creación de un Observatorio Centroamericano de Derechos Humanos del Instituto de Estudios Latinoamericanos (IDELA) de la Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica (UNA).

Abuse can occur in different forms. It can be physical, emotional, sexual, spiritual, social and/or economic. The diagrams below describe some of the abuse tactics batterers use as they attempt to gain or maintain power and control over their intimate partners. Abuse does not always progress in the steps shown here. Sometimes the abuse may advance from pushing or hitting directly to more severe physical violence such as the use of a weapon. Although each relationship is unique, any type of abuse must be considered a serious cause for concern. Despite different circumstances, it is important to remember that abuse can escalate (especially if there is no intervention). A coordinated community response holding batterers accountable for their abusive behaviors is essential, as is a response acknowledging and respecting the rights of victims of domestic violence.

El presente trabajo se sostiene prudentemente desde la perspectiva del derecho internacional y la jurisprudencia interamericana para atender el objetivo primordial en demostrar que para una sociedad pacífica, es necesario eliminar las formas de violencia exteriorizada por las empresas y el Estado hacia los militantes de la casa común sean de las comunidades o pueblos indígenas. Requiriéndose para tal objetivo, exigir el cumplimiento necesario y urgente de las obligaciones estaduales (garantizar los derechos e investigar con diligencia los casos) por parte de los Estados y hacia las empresas que despliegan su actividad en su jurisdicción, y priorizar la defensa de los derechos de quienes defienden a la naturaleza desde la eliminación de las formas de estigmatización, criminalización y asesinatos.

This exploratory paper addresses the relationship of science journalism, science communication, environmental activism, and social movements. It draws on data from Latin America, exploring how journalists and activists use science communication as a tool for telling stories about environmental conflicts that frequently turn violent (more than 1600 land and environmental activists lost their lives between 2002 and 2020 in Latin America, more than three times that of all other regions of the world combined). The main goal of the paper is to understand how scientific storytelling by NGOs helps them present their points of view for journalists and to influence public opinion. Our data is drawn from the formal reports of four NGOs and from semi-structured interviews with representatives from each NGO's staff about their use of science communication. Our analysis suggests that Latin American NGOs use science communication tools such as scientific storytelling and scientific explanation to support journalists and to communicate with broad publics about complex phenomena such as socio-environmental conflicts, contributing to efforts to reduce the alarming amount of violence in the region.

En el presente trabajo se evidencia, tomando como ejemplo la creciente ola de protección de defensores de derechos humanos, la contradictoria relación del desarrollo con unos derechos humanos parte de este discurso y las posibilidades de emancipación a través de esta herramienta de defensa de la dignidad humana.

Defensores del derecho a la tierra: atacados por enfrentarse al desarrollo desenfrenado FIDH-OMCT INFORME ANUAL 2014 «Se ha hecho un trabajo encomiable con este informe anual, en el que se trata un problema crucial y creciente en muchos países del mundo, donde a los defensores del derecho a la tierra, debido a su compromiso con la defensa y la protección de los derechos humanos, se les han puesto trabas y se los ha sometido a abusos que varían desde el hostigamiento judicial a la detención arbitraria, desde la difamación a la vigilancia y desde las amenazas a los asesinatos». «Además, continuaré centrándome de forma general en la protección de los defensores del derecho a la tierra, insistiendo en la necesidad de incrementar la obligación de rendir cuentas, tanto en mis comunicaciones a los Estados como en mis visitas a países. Para ello me apoyaré sin duda en las conclusiones de este informe anual, que proporciona las claves para comprender los patrones de las violaciones contra de...