Human Rights

Indigenous Rights, Amnesty International:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr56/6841/2023/en/

(Extract)

The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment stated that “[f]fortress conservation measures are

formidable threats to Indigenous peoples and other rural rights holders’ human rights, including their nature

governance practices and traditional livelihoods, food security, educational opportunities, health, and access to

traditional medicines, safe drinking water and culturally and spiritually significant sites.” The World Bank has found

that “engaging [Indigenous peoples’] more effectively in biodiversity conservation represents a win-win situation” and

that “Indigenous peoples are carriers of ancestral knowledge and wisdom about this biodiversity. Their effective

participation in biodiversity conservation programmes as experts in protecting and managing biodiversity and natural

resources would result in more comprehensive and cost-effective conservation and management of biodiversity

worldwide.”

Wildlife conservation must therefore be a win-win solution where those who live close to wildlife can be involved in

protecting it, while continuing to gain from the conservation themselves through their livelihoods such as the use of

grazing land for the Maasai. Any tourism initiatives on Indigenous peoples’ lands must only proceed with their free,

prior, and informed consent, and with benefit-sharing from revenues that the state gains from them.

The Tanzanian government is also obliged to protect its people from human rights abuses, including abuses

committed by private companies. All companies must be regulated to prevent the pursuit of profit at the expense of

human rights. Companies, on the other hand, have a responsibility to respect all human rights wherever they operate.

This responsibility is laid out in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UN Guiding Principles), an

internationally endorsed standard of expected conduct.

The responsibility of companies to respect human rights is independent of a state’s own human rights responsibilities

and exists over and above compliance with national laws and regulations protecting human rights. This responsibility

requires companies to avoid causing or contributing to human rights abuses through their own business activities and

to address impacts with which they are involved, including by remediating any actual impacts. Tanzanian authorities

must therefore conduct impartial, independent, and transparent investigations into the role of corporate complicity in

the forced evictions in Loliondo with a view to holding any perpetrators fully accountable, in accordance with domestic

and international standards of due process.