Human Rights Online Philippines

17 April 2024
Solidarity Statement on the International Day of Peasant’s Struggles

In commemoration of the International Day of Peasant’s Struggles, Focus on the Global South calls for an urgent stop to the criminalisation of small-scale food providers and their advocates across the world, and to ensure their human and collective rights. We ask all governments to uphold the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) and to “[Art III, No. 4] take all necessary measures to ensure protection by the competent authorities of everyone, individually and in association with others, against any violence, threat, retaliation, de jure or de facto discrimination, pressure or any other arbitrary action as a consequence of his or her legitimate exercise and defence of the rights described in the Declaration”, including the Right to Land. Special attention is needed to protect and advance the rights of women, Indigenous Peoples and all social groups who face historic and contemporary marginalisation.

Peasant and other small-scale food producing communities engaged in struggles for land, water, the commons, and food sovereignty often face various forms of repression in the exercise of their rights to defend territories and tillages against powerful, deep-pocketed forces from within government ranks and the business sector. Across Asia, criminalization has become a key strategy to disempower, maim and disrupt lawful assertions of rights by food producing communities to their land and territories.

Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP) are lawsuits designed to delegitimize rights-based claim making, and create a chilling effect across society as a whole. Criminalization has over the years become a routine tactic to capture and displace farming communities, while maintaining public and/or commercial acceptance for development projects.

Criminalization is also used to silence community journalists and the media that cover peasants’ struggles and provide peoples’ movements with platforms that amplify critiques, calls, and demands from the countryside.

Read complete article @https://focusweb.org