[STATEMENT] Stop the Attacks on Indigenous Peoples

For many of the world’s Indigenous Peoples, defending the environment is inseparable from defending their collective rights, identities, cultures, livelihoods, and ways of life. Their spiritual and material relationships with their lands, territories, waters, and resources sustain their communities and carry responsibilities to future generations. These relationships are protected under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, including the rights to maintain their institutions and cultures, determine their own development priorities, and conserve and protect their environment.

Yet throughout Asia and the Pacific, Indigenous Peoples continue to confront environmental plunder such as the appropriation and destructive exploitation of their lands, territories, and resources for mining, industrial agriculture, energy, tourism, infrastructure, and other profit-driven projects. This plunder is among the fundamental causes of Indigenous Peoples’ struggles for self-determination, territorial rights, environmental justice, and survival. States and corporations frequently disregard Indigenous knowledge and governance systems, deny land rights, and portray communities resisting destructive projects as “anti-development.” Such narratives obscure development models that concentrate wealth and control to a few capitalists while dispossessing Indigenous Peoples and degrading the ecosystems on which they depend.

The shrinking of civic space must be understood within this context. Militarization, surveillance, red-tagging, arbitrary arrest, fabricated charges, forced eviction, and the violent dispersal of protests are not isolated abuses. They are measures through which states suppress dissent and facilitate corporate interests in Indigenous territories. These acts violate the right of Indigenous Peoples to participate in decision-making through their own representative institutions and traditional governance systems, and undermine the safe and enabling environment required for environmental human rights defenders.

In 2026, these patterns have remained evident across the region. On 1 January, Philippine military operations involving aerial bombardment and strafing in Abra de Ilog, Occidental Mindoro, killed three Mangyan-Iraya children and two young researchers, injured the children’s mother, and displaced hundreds of residents. The operations were officially presented as counter-insurgency measures, while Indigenous and human rights organizations linked the intensifying militarization to threats posed by renewed mining and large-scale renewable-energy development on Mangyan-Iraya ancestral lands.

Karen communities in Myanmar have likewise endured continuing air strikes, drone attacks, and artillery shelling by the military junta. The Indigenous Peoples Movement for Self-Determination and Liberation reported at least 25 deaths from attacks on Karen communities in January 2026 alone. These attacks form part of a broader pattern of violence and displacement affecting Indigenous territories in Myanmar.

In Manipur, India, a bomb attack on 7 April killed two Indigenous children. The perpetrators had not been conclusively identified at the time of reporting. Protests demanding justice were followed by clashes in which security forces used live fire, killing protesters and injuring others. These incidents demonstrate how unresolved conflict, militarization, and state repression continue to endanger Indigenous communities and restrict their freedoms of assembly and expression.

In Bangladesh’s Madhupur Sal Forest, Garo, Koch, and Barman Indigenous communities have faced forced eviction and threats to their ancestral lands linked to government forest agencies, commercial rubber plantations, and proposed tourism and “eco-park” development. In Malaysia, workers from a palm-oil concessionaire, accompanied by police, demolished six homes and a customary community hall belonging to the Jakun Orang Asli community of Kampung Sungai Baru, Pahang, on 4 May. The demolition was reportedly conducted without notice, a court order, or the community’s free, prior, and informed consent.

Aeta communities in Capas, Tarlac, Philippines, also fear displacement and the loss of ancestral lands, livelihoods, and water sources because of the proposed Pax Silica hub within the Luzon Economic Corridor. Although government agencies dispute that formally titled ancestral-domain lands will be affected, the communities have demanded meaningful consultation and respect for their land rights before the project proceeds.

In Assam, India, Indigenous land-rights defender Pranab Doley and four other activists were arrested in July following protests against the dispossession of Adivasi families for a proposed luxury resort near Kaziranga National Park. Although Doley was granted bail, he was subsequently detained under India’s National Security Act. His continuing detention illustrates the misuse of security laws to criminalize Indigenous resistance and silence environmental and land defenders.

On the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, we demand justice and effective remedies for all Indigenous Peoples whose rights have been violated through environmental plunder, development aggression, militarization, and repression. States must end attacks and reprisals against Indigenous environmental human rights defenders; recognize Indigenous Peoples’ rights to their lands, territories, resources, knowledge systems, cultures, and institutions; and prevent forced removal. They must consult and cooperate in good faith with Indigenous Peoples, through their own representative institutions, to obtain their free, prior, and informed consent before approving projects affecting their lands, territories, or resources.

Indigenous Peoples are rights-holders and peoples with the right to self-determination and to pursue development according to their own priorities. Protecting their territories and defenders is indispensable to environmental justice, human rights, and the survival of present and future generations.