Four people were killed and dozens arrested last week in the village of Dong Tam as a long-running land dispute flared after a dawn raid by police

By Rina Chandran

BANGKOK - A deadly land dispute in Vietnam has led to a crackdown on social media posts, a sign of growing heavy-handedness by authorities as rising demand for land spurs more conflicts across the country, analysts and human rights activists said.

The Hadzabe people of northern Tanzania are one of the world’s oldest communities. Living at the base of the Rift Valley, believed to be the origin of human species, the Hadzabe live as they always have.

For tens of thousands of years, the Hadzabe have hunted and gathered food in their forests. There has never been a single account of famine.

BAGAYO PETRO, Hadzabe, Yaeda Valley, Tanzania

When Manjari was 23, she was elected the first woman pradhan in her village as well as in all of Himachal Pradesh. She hasn't looked back since.

Have Your Say: The Draft Constitution Eighteenth Amendment Bill [B – 2019]

The ad hoc Committee to initiate and introduce legislation amending section 25 of the Constitution invites stakeholders and interested persons to submit written submissions on the Draft Constitution Eighteenth Amendment Bill [B – 2019]

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, indigenous pygmy communities displaced from their lands for “conservation” and a community leader imprisoned for defending their rights

Ercilia Araya is the President of  Pai-Ote, a Colla Indigenous community of 60 people in the Atacama Region of Northern Chile.  Since 2014, Ercilia has been criminalized and harassed for defending her community’s land rights against mining projects, and denouncing the pollution of sacred water sources in the Andes.

The ancestral territory of Pai-Ote is of great mineral wealth and includes the “Maricunga Strip”, one of the most important gold districts in the country. At least a dozen gold mining projects, most of them Canadian, are operating there.

Ranked as a country most vulnerable to the impact of climate change, The Philippines is also the most dangerous place in the world to defend land rights and the environment. President Duterte’s government has enabled seizures of Indigenous lands by an environmentally damaging gold and copper mining project. When communities stand up to defend their land, they face threats, intimidation, criminalisation and even murder.

Bernardo Caal is an indigenous Q’eqchi leader from Guatemala currently serving a seven year prison sentence. His crime? Defending the Cahabón River, one of the largest in the country, against two hydroelectric dams.  

The river is of plays a central role in the lives of 195 Q’eqchi communities in the municipality of Santa María de Cahabón, in the department of Alta Verapáz. Today it is under threat from seven hydroelectric projects that have already destroyed hectares of primary forests and hills that are sacred to the Q’eqchi.  

We can’t tackle the climate crisis without tackling corruption.

The Land Portal Foundation is recruiting up to two new board members to complement its existing board.

The Land Portal was set up in 2009 as a partnership project dedicated to supporting the efforts of the rural poor to gain equitable access to land by addressing a fragmentation of information resources on land, which makes it difficult and often prohibitively expensive to draw together reliable evidence in support of programs, advocacy campaigns or policy formulation, especially for grassroots organisations.

Cadasta Foundation has launched its new Global Land Rights Challenge Fund to help partners better leverage Cadasta’s innovative tools and services to document land and resource rights worldwide.

The Land Rights Challenge Fund will feature multiple grant programs through 2021, each designed to advance land rights and tenure security for vulnerable populations around the world.