[STATEMENT] Environmental Defenders Day – End militarization and other forms of state violence!

The Asia Pacific is scourged by destructive resource extraction and exploitation by mining companies, agribusiness, aggressive infrastructure development, and other forms of wasteful and unsustainable industry, perpetrated by corporations that put their interests and profits over rights, lives, and communities. We have also seen that where these pillagers operate, they are most often protected by the state – the very entity that we expect to regulate and restrict their destructive behavior. 

According to the Global Witness 2024 report on attacks against land and environmental defenders, the majority of extrajudicial killings of defenders were perpetrated by mostly state actors – either by the military, police forces, or other government agencies. 

Legal instruments, which were supposed to be the recourse of defenders for protection, have also been used to target defenders. Defenders face illegal detention without access to their families and lawyers for months and sometimes years at a time. States tag defenders as anti-development or as terrorists, and plant weapons and ammunition in order to incriminate them. Vague laws regarding anti-terrorism are weaponized to target defenders for arrest and detention. In Indonesia, even crop cultivation laws have been used to target defenders for arrest.

In Southeast Asia especially, enforced disappearances have been a concerning trend, putting families, friends, and fellow defenders in a state of uncertainty and fear. The Philippines has been the hotspot for these disappearances, most often linked to the military. 

All over the region, we can see that defenders cannot rely on states for protection, and instead look to them as one of the key threats to our enjoyment of environmental rights, given their sponsorship and protection of destructive and extractive businesses like mining, agribusiness, and logging. States wield their power not against those who destroy the environment, but against those who aim to preserve and protect the land, the ecosystems that inhabit it, and the ways of life that are intertwined within it. This Environmental Defenders Day, the Asia Pacific Network of Environmental Defenders deeply condemns this harsh reality, calls for justice and accountability against the perpetrators of these attacks, and pushes states to recognize the important role of environmental defenders in society and enact protections to enable their work in environmental and land defense. We also enjoin fellow defenders to persist in our resistance against environmental destruction, and strengthen our efforts to build solidarity across the region in order to broaden our campaigns and advocacies, including the protection of environmental defenders. 

Stop state attacks! Defend the Defenders!