We share news linked to global processes, the Indigenous Peoples' movement and IWGIA's work in countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Find news, interviews, human rights alerts, new publications and reports here.
On 29 November, four Maasai Indigenous communities in Loliondo, Tanzania celebrated a rare win on their long road to justice as the Appellate Division of the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) upheld their appeal of a September 2022 case.
Despite the Ogiek obtaining interim court orders in both the Narok and Nakuru Law Courts, on 9 and 23 November respectively, for the Government of Kenya to stop its evictions of the Ogiek in the Mau Forest, authorities are continuing their illegal activities and increasing their violent tactics.
During climate talks under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Bonn (UNFCCC), Germany, in June 2023, IWGIA met and talked with seven Indigenous youth leaders from Latin America. These youth had travelled to Bonn to make their voices heard, promoting transformative change and supporting the historic and multiple causes for which their Indigenous Peoples are fighting.
Born in the heat of the conquest and the slave trade, Black communities in the Americas have developed their own cultural practices that differentiate them from the rest of the population. Their music, their religiosity and their joy are the most representative characteristics of 170 million people who make up a transnational native community. After the advances in national jurisprudence, it is now the turn of international law to recognize the advancement of the collective rights of Afro-descendant peoples. The Black peoples of the world demand a declaration of rights on the recognition, justice and ethno-development of our Afro-descendant peoples.
The history of the Americas was forever shaped by the massive introduction of Africans as slaves, who were smuggled across the Atlantic trade routes. However, these ships brought more than “just black bodies" reduced to commodities. These bodies carried with them a rich ancestral heritage and diverse epistemologies that, when reinterpreted in the context of the diaspora, allowed Black people to establish communities and institutions based on their own territorial principles and specific ways of relating to nature.
IWGIA - International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs - is a global human rights organisation dedicated to promoting and defending Indigenous Peoples’ rights. Read more.