- Interview: Activist on Root Causes of Forced Evictions in Zimbabwe My colleague Ryan Schlief and I are here in warm and sandy Dakar attending the 2011 World Social Forum along with about 75,000 other people from over 130 countries. We traveled all this way to meet with key allies in our forced evictions campaign, learn more about how activists around the world are using video in their advocacy on forced evictions, and brush up on our (very) rusty French.
- Mexico Training on Forced Evictions A quick update from the WITNESS training in Mexico City in association with the Habitat International Coalition (HIC)- Latin America. We've been holed-up for nine days solid in a convent (cheap, good food, peaceful atmosphere, nightly curfew) training a range of human rights defenders either from or working with communities whose rights are being compromised or violated by dam mega-projects.
- What do we wish each other on Human Rights Day 2010? The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is profiling over a dozen human rights defenders, including the Venerable Luon Sovath, on Human Rights Day, 10 December, this year.
- Brazil: Megaevents and Forced Evictions For the past 20 years, the roughly 450 families that live in Vila Autódromo, a low-income community in western Rio de Janeiro, have been fighting off eviction.
- Video Documents Land-Grabbing in Rural Cambodia In an earlier post, I shareda clip from a video advocacy training in Cambodia. The first practical training exercise took place in Siem Reap province, where one of the trainees, the Venerable Luon Sovath, grew up.
- Video Training Targets Forced Evictions in Cambodia In Cambodia, WITNESS has focused the past two years on supporting LICADHO's efficacy to produce and strategically distribute advocacy videos on forced evictions in the name of development - the same subject as our new global campaign.
- Today is World Habitat Day For the month of October, in conjunction with the Housing and Land Rights Day (World Habitat Day) on 04 October and our global campaign, WITNESS will feature advocacy videos used around the world in campaigns against forced evictions in the name of development.
- Outsourcing our food: “Land grabs” and the food on your plate This week the World Bank is hosting an online consultation with global civil society based on its controversial report released last week: “Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can It Yield Sustainable and Equitable Results?"
- Forced evictions in focus at the Americas Social Forum More than 15,000 Indigenous people at risk of being forcibly removed from their lands to make way for the construction of the Inambari Hydroelectric Center in Peru, a series of six dams in the Peruvian Amazon that will cost $15 billion dollars and, when ready, send approximately 80% of its energy to support large industries in neighboring Brazil.
- Indigenous Rights Protected After Indian Mine Stopped Following years of controversy and activism, the Government of India on Tuesday rejected the proposed bauxite mining project in the eastern state of Orissa determining that the mine violates environmental and forestry laws and would lead to further abuses against the indigenous communities in the area.
- Forced Evictions in the Name of Development In an earlier blog post my colleague Sam Gregory introduced our new focus on gender-based violence. Our second focus area is what is known as development-induced displacement, or the forced eviction of people and communities in the name of development.
- WITNESS’ Commitment to the Power of Networks One of the main decisions WITNESS made in our recent strategic review was to work more with, and learn more from networks where the cumulative efforts of using video at local, regional, and international levels can create tremendous change.
- Groundbreaking Use of Video Helps Win Case for Indigenous Endorois People in Kenya In 1973 the Kenyan Endorois community was evicted from their land. In 2009 their case was taken to court, and with the help of WITNESS, they produced a film about their story which ultimately helped lead to a decision requiring the government to restitute their lands with compensation.