News on Land

• Indonesia’s outgoing parliament has decided to hold off passing a slate of new bills, including on mining and on land reforms, that have been criticized as being pro-business and anti-environment.
• The decision comes amid massive student-led protests across the country in response to the earlier passage of another contentious bill widely seen as weakening the national anti-corruption agency.
• The postponement means the incoming batch of legislators will decide on the bills, but activists point out that they won’t have to start their deliberations f

Forest Department is trying to register the land under their name without paying compensation, alleged owners

Supposed land owners in four upazilas of Panchagarh have been claiming the land that the Forest Department acquired in 1967.

Revisional Survey (RS Khatiyan) in Panchagarh is underway, which began in 2008, after the last one in 1962. The Forest Department is trying to register the land under their name without paying any compensation, alleged the owners.

he Northern Territory government released its long overdue draft Aboriginal justice agreement (AJA) this month.

The NGO Human Rights at Sea has proposed amendments to the draft agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea currently under development. 

• Indonesia’s parliament is rushing to pass a controversial mining bill by Sept. 30, when the current legislators’ term ends.
• President Joko Widodo had previously asked for deliberations of this bill and other contentious pieces of legislation to be suspended, following massive student-led protests that have turned deadly.
• Watchdogs say the bill panders to the interests of mining companies, granting them bigger concessions, longer contracts, and fewer environmental obligations.

Study shows martial law in an island territory is also being used as pretext for violence

President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs and declaration of martial law in an island territory are being used as a pretext to attack people defending their land and environment in the Philippines, new research shows.

A film about one of the world's last hunter-gatherer tribes living in Malaysia's rainforest premiers on Thursday, with its indigenous actors urging authorities to formally grant them land rights after a decades-long battle.

Paradise War, which debuts at the Zurich Film Festival, follows the 1984 expedition made by intrepid Swiss environmentalist Bruno Manser who lived with Malaysia's Penan nomads and made their plight globally known.

The Indonesian government is failing to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples who have lost their traditional forests and livelihoods to oil palm plantations in West Kalimantan and Jambi provinces, Human Rights Watch said in a report. Loss of forest occurs on a massive scale and not only harms local indigenous peoples but is also associated with global climate change.

She’d lived on this historically black D.C. block for 40 years. Now the city she knew was vanishing, and so was her place in it.

She was moving slowly, but she needed to speed up. Her blue sandals clicked on the hardwood floor, echoing off the empty green walls of the two-bedroom rent-controlled apartment in Northwest Washington where she had spent the past 40 years of her life. Reluctantly, she spun from one room to the next, packing boxes, folding sheets, unfolding sheets, opening cupboards, closing cupboards, doing a mental inventory.

The climate crisis threatens to dramatically alter people's relationships with the land on which they rely. Meanwhile, many climate solutions are themselves land-intensive: solar and wind energy, carbon dioxide sequestration, and finding places for people displaced by climate change to live and grow food. The result is an ever-increasing competition for land, as well as governance and justice challenges that are both intractable and inextricably linked.

 Palm oil plantations in Indonesia and commercial fruit orchards in the Philippines have uprooted indigenous people and rural communities from their land, despite laws put in place to protect them, human rights groups said.

Powerful businesses, corrupt officials and paramilitary groups are fuelling violence against rural communities in the Philippines, Britain-based Global Witness said on Tuesday.

New technologies used to map areas in developing nations for granting titles and aiding development could be misused to further marginalize vulnerable people, analysts and land experts warned on Friday.

From Kenya to the Philippines, authorities are using satellite imagery, drones, GPS navigation systems and artificial intelligence to map customary lands, fix boundaries, and modernize land records to verify ownership and issue titles.