News on Land

The Land for Life Award was launched at the UNCCD COP10 in the Republic of Korea as part of the Changwon Initiative.

NEW DELHI - A push to formalise land claims, map settlements and digitise records is not always in the best interests of vulnerable communities, and may even lead to greater rights abuses, analysts warned on Friday.

From Peru to the Philippines, governments are curtailing the rights of indigenous communities and forcibly resettling people in slums, land campaigners say, while mapping lands and digitising land records with the aim of increasing efficiency.

Sergio Rojas, a leader of the Bribrí community in Costa Rica, was murdered Monday night in the indigenous territory of Salitre.

An investigation into the death is underway, and President Carlos Alvarado has called the events “a tragic day for the Bribrí people, the indigenous communities and for all of Costa Rica.”

Costa Rica has for years struggled to mediate land-right disputes between indigenous and non-indigenous people. In 2012, Rojas was shot at six times in an apparent assassination attempt near the reserve.

Odisha's record in addressing forest rights is poorer than the national average, despite the Union Tribal Minister hailing from the state

As Odisha goes to poll in April, the concerns of 95,91,000 tribals in the state will be a prominent electoral issue. The Schedule Tribes (ST) account for nearly 22 per cent of the state's population. The Mayurbhanj district records the highest density of tribal population.

Out of the 21 parliamentary constituencies (PC) in the state, five — Nabarangpur, Koraput, Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, Sundargarh — are reserved for ST candidates.

GENEVA, March 18 (Reuters) - Israel is depriving millions of Palestinians of access to a regular supply of clean water while stripping their land of minerals “in an apparent act of pillage”, a United Nations human rights investigator said on Monday.

Michael Lynk, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, said that Israel “continues full-steam with settlement expansion” in the West Bank, which the United Nations and many countries deem illegal. There are some 20-25,000 new settlers a year, he said.

Women’s economic empowerment is a necessary step to promote women’s rights and achieve gender equality. Throughout the last decades, women have been entering the labor market and, despite the still existing inequalities in terms of wages and opportunities, there are many sectors in which women have achieved great visibility. This is not the case of agriculture and livestock. Currently, women working in rural areas must face a double burden, one linked to the fact of being a woman and one linked to the difficulties of life in the countryside.

A charter designed by civil society organisations, workers’ collectives, and the urban poor reimagines our cities

While agrarian distress has slipped into the pre-election discourse as an important political subject, it is imperative to ask why the urban question is no less political. India’s cities are grappling with acute urban livelihood issues relating to jobs, housing, migration, living conditions, mobility, sanitation, climate change and sustainability.

A fledgling pressure group of journalists, researchers and community workers is taking a message to Ugandan rural communities to save the trees.

The group is fighting the rapid destruction of trees in the region that was once the epicenter of a twenty-year war that had left a legacy of poverty and fragile land rights.

Uganda’s rapidly growing urban population is boosting demand for charcoal, trucks of which are piled high with white sacks of the burnt tree nuggets on the road to the capital.

Aboriginals in Australia have won a ground-breaking case that paves the way for billions of dollars in compensation claims for colonial land loss, as well as loss of spiritual connection.

The High Court of Australia ruled in favor of the Ngaliwurru and Nungali groups from the Northern Territory in the biggest ‘native title’ ruling on indigenous rights to traditional land and water in decades on Wednesday.

An amendment to Myanmar’s land-ownership laws will make it nearly impossible for Rohingya refugees and Myanmar’s internally displaced to return to land they’ve tilled for generations, Peter Yeung reports.

HUSSEIN AHMED WAS once the respected chief of Inn Din, a village in the northern part of Myanmar’s Rakhine state. But since the end of 2017, the 74-year-old Rohingya has been a refugee in Bangladesh’s sprawling Kutupalong refugee camp.

The U.N. said 113 rights activists were killed last year, many were land rights activists campaigning for the return of property they say was stolen by illegal armed groups

BOGOTA - Slow implementation of Colombia's peace accord and a lack of government presence in rural areas is putting land and human rights activists in danger, the United Nations said on Thursday.