"Decade of defiance", 29 September 2022

... Global Witness recorded that 200 land and environmental defenders were killed in 2021 – nearly four people a week. These lethal attacks continue to take place in the context of a wider range of threats against defenders who are being targeted by government, business and other non-state actors with violence, intimidation, smear campaigns and criminalisation. This is happening across every region of the world and in almost every sector. 

Mexico was the country with the highest recorded number of killings... Over 40% of those killed were Indigenous people, and over a third of the total were forced disappearances, including at least eight  members of the Yaqui community. Whilst Brazil and India both saw a rise in lethal attacks from 20 to 26, and from 4 to 14 respectively, both Colombia and the Philippines saw a drop in killings to 33 in 2021 from 65, and 19 from 30 in 2021 respectively. Yet overall they remain two of the countries with the highest numbers of killings in the world since 2012. Over three-quarters of the attacks recorded took place in Latin America. In Brazil, Peru and Venezuela, 78% of attacks took place in the Amazon...

Where a sector could be identified, just over a quarter of lethal attacks were reportedly linked to resource exploitation – logging, mining and large-scale agribusiness – and hydroelectric dams and other infrastructure... Mining was the sector linked to the most killings with 27 cases – with the majority of attacks taking place in Mexico (15), followed by the Philippines (6), Venezuela (4), Nicaragua (1) and Ecuador (1)...

In countries across the world, corporations are operating with impunity, facilitated in part by corruption. Guidelines for business to prevent harms remain voluntary for the most part, meaning violations of environmental and human rights continue to abound and the price for fighting back can be fatal...