UN publishes landmark guidelines to combat human rights abuses in conservation

The UN Environment Programme guidelines were prompted by repeated revelations that big conservation corporations are responsible for grave human rights abuses against Indigenous peoples whose lands have been taken for Protected Areas. John H. Knox, a former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, was instrumental in shaping the principles, which represent a milestone in the fight to decolonize conservation.

Some of the shocking exposés that demonstrate the need for the guidelines include Buzzfeed’s investigative series revealing repeated abuses by WWF-funded guards against Baka Indigenous people, and the Daily Mail report on how African Parks’ rangers abused Indigenous people in Congo. Countless other scandals have also been reported, many of them prompted by Survival International investigations.

The new “Core Human Rights Principles for Private Conservation Organizations and Funders” list minimum standards by which conservation corporations such as WWF, WCS, African Parks and Conservation International should abide.

They include:

• Every conservation organization and funder should ensure that it respects the rights of Indigenous Peoples, including their right to self-determination, their right to the lands, territories, and resources that they have traditionally owned, occupied, or otherwise used or acquired.
• Conservation organizations and funders should never undertake or support actions that adversely affect the rights of Indigenous Peoples without first consulting and cooperating with them in good faith, obtaining and maintaining their free, prior, and informed consent…
• Every conservation organization and funder should prevent potential adverse human rights impacts that it may cause or to which it may contribute and immediately cease any actual adverse impacts that it causes or to which it contributes.
• Every conservation organization and funder should condition its support for anti-poaching and other law enforcement activities… on compliance by those activities with international human rights norms and standards. If the activities fail to comply with such human rights norms and standards, the conservation organization or funder should restrict or terminate the support.

Survival International Director Caroline Pearce said today: “It should serve as a powerful indictment of the current state of conservation that these guidelines, setting out the most basic human rights principles, are necessary in 2024. But there is no doubt that they are. The conservation industry as a whole, and especially the big conservation corporations, have been getting away with appalling abuses of Indigenous peoples for decades, and only change their behaviour when forced to by pressure from their funders or the public. If these guidelines, codifying the bare minimum standards for ethical behaviour, can help to prevent abuse before it happens, then that’s to be welcomed.

“But much more is needed. What the guidelines don’t do is look at the whole rotten model of traditional ‘fortress’ conservation, which is still, after so many decades, predicated on robbing Indigenous peoples of their territories, turning their lands into Protected Areas, and then enforcing the dispossession with force. It’s very simple: conservation that doesn’t respect Indigenous land rights violates internationally recognized human rights.”