Article written by Radha Krishna Khadka for Online Khabar, originally posted at: https://english.onlinekhabar.com/history-of-land-rights-movement-in-nepal.html
Photo: A rally organised in Surkhet district headquarters Birendranagar demanding establishment Organised Settlement Commission on September 07, 2017
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Yesterday, on International Human Rights Day, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands announced that Saw Eh Say, the coordinator from the Kayah Earthrights Action Network (KEAN), received the 2020 Human Rights Tulip Myanmar Award for his great efforts to promote the right to land in Myanmar. The Human Rights Tulip is an annual award of the Dutch government for outstanding and courageous human rights defenders.
The COVID-19 crisis has made 2020 the most challenging year in our lifetime. It has demonstrated the need to ensure that sustainable and equitable land governance remains a priority on the international agenda. The pandemic also underscored the importance of digital platforms for both maintaining access to data and information and providing a space people can trust.
Last month, India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, issued the first 0.1 million Rural Property Cards (RPCs) to communities across more than 763 villages in six states in rural India under the SVAMITVA scheme.
The ability of the Embera villages in Panama to shut off the road into their community, and to exclude outsiders, is based in large measure on the government’s official recognition of their indigenous collective land rights.
We represent around five percent of the population of humanity, but we preserve around eighty-two percent of the world's biodiversity.
I am Dolene Miller, an Afro-descendant from the Caribbean (Atlantic) Coast of Nicaragua and for me it is important and very necessary to support any initiative to protect my community from COVID19. As ethnic minorities, we are facing a health crisis in precarious conditions because the national government itself has not wanted to assume its responsibility to protect the population from infection, has not issued a quarantine and, on the contrary, is promoting massive activities according to its thesis of contagion of the herd.
The global conservation community now faces the added challenge of Covid-19 on top of a longstanding set of complex conservation, sustainability, and development challenges. In the wake of this pandemic, return to business as usual is not a viable option. The existing systems and structures upon which conservation is based must evolve. Climate change, biodiversity conservation, and poverty elimination efforts have been further complicated by Covid-19, with the brunt of the pandemic borne most acutely by the poorest and most vulnerable.
Last week the world observed the International Day of Indigenous Peoples on Sunday, Aug. 9, amid a global pandemic that UN Secretary-General António Guterres noted has had a “devastating impact” on the world’s Indigenous communities.