More than 6,400 attacks against human rights defenders were reported between 2015 to 2024, according to a new report from nonprofit Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC).
“That’s close to two attacks every day over the past 10 years against defenders who are raising concerns about business-related risks and harms,” said Christen Dobson, co-head of BHRRC’s civic freedoms and human rights defenders’ program, during a media briefing on the report. Dobson said it was “just the tip of the iceberg” since they only used publicly available information, including reporting from journalists and civil society groups, but many attacks are never reported publicly.
“We also, over these past 10 years, have seen a consistent pattern of attacks, and that many defenders face multiple attacks, and there’s often an escalation,” Dobson said.
Of the recorded attacks, three in four were against climate, land and environmental defenders.
Although attacks happen in almost every business sector, one of the report’s co-authors, BHRRC senior legal researcher and project coordinator Lady Nancy Zuluaga Jaramillo said during the briefing that “mining has consistently been the most dangerous sectors for human rights defenders.” It’s responsible for one in every four reported attacks, the report found.
The report said five sectors “intimately connected to the climate crisis” have been linked to the highest number of attacks. A total of 1,681 attacks were attributed to the mining sector, followed by 1,154 from agribusiness, 792 from fossil fuels, 454 from renewable energy, and 359 from logging.
“Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia and the Pacific have consistently been the most dangerous region for human rights defenders,” Jaramillo said.
Roughly one in five attacks were against Indigenous people, though they only make up 6% of the world’s population. And 31% of people killed were Indigenous defenders, mostly from Latin America and the Philippines.
Journalists were targets of nearly 600 attacks, most of them were reporting on climate, land, and environmental issues or corruption.
In terms of types of attacks, more than half or 3,311 were judicial harassment including strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs), 1,088 were killings, 835 were in the form of intimidation and threats, and 629 were nonlethal cases of physical violence.
Despite government responsibility to investigate the attacks, especially killings, “the majority of attacks — both lethal and non-lethal — go uninvestigated and unpunished, fostering a culture of impunity that only emboldens further violence,” the report said.
BHRRC and its partner organizations say there need to be laws to protect human rights defenders and companies need to recognize the value of defenders and engage with them as part of due diligence processes.
Correction May 27, 2025: This report previously mentioned 3,310 SLAPPs but it has been updated to 3,311 judicial harassment attacks including SLAPPs.
Banner image: Photos of human rights lawyer Ricardo Arturo Lagunes Gasca, who disappeared last year in Mexico. Photo by Luis Rojas via Global Witness.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
