Report Reveals That 331 Human Rights Defenders Were Murdered in 2020

Source: Report Reveals That 331 Human Rights Defenders Were Murdered in 2020

In 2020, at least 331 human rights defenders (HRDs) were murdered while advocating for a safer, cleaner, fairer world. The latest Global Analysis by Front Line Defenders, an NGO and watchdog based in Dublin, revealed this shockingly high number when it was published on February 11.¹ The report said the number will likely grow once cases currently under investigation are confirmed.

Some defenders were forced to pass through new COVID checkpoints enforced by armed groups that exposed them to even greater risk.¹ 

Most were forced to switch to online communication, which proved challenging with unreliable Internet connections and security risks. Interacting virtually made it harder to build important relationships: “Working remotely with defenders made it more difficult and took longer to establish trust; online capacity building had to be carried out in much shorter bursts over longer periods of time.”

As the numbers show, South and Central America are particularly risky for environmental defenders, a fact that Front Line Defenders (FLD) head of protection Ed O’Donovan described to the Guardian as “no surprise.” When Treehugger asked why, the FLD’s Protection Coordinator for the Americas explained:

“Judicial systems in Latin America are marked with corruption scandals and irregularities… It is not a surprise that those seeking justice and denouncing impunity in the face of powerful interests that sustain this structures would be targeted and seek to be silenced. There aren’t signs of real political will to dismantle those structures; on the contrary, we observe complicity and targeted attacks against those who denounce it.”

Adam Shapiro, head of communications and visibility for FLD, told Treehugger that Latin America’s danger is due in part to “the amount of natural resource extraction and governments’ neoliberal approaches to development,” as well as “institutionalized racism against Indigenous peoples [that] feeds into impunity and levels of violence.” Natural resource extraction, however, is not always linked to higher murder rates; Shapiro offered Zambia as an example of a country with high levels of resource extraction, but no reported killings.