Environmental Defenders Remain Among World’s Most Targeted Activists

Environmental and Indigenous rights defenders remained among the world’s most targeted human rights advocates in 2025, despite landmark rulings by international courts affirming governments’ obligations to protect both the environment and those who defend it.

At least 358 human rights defenders were killed last year, according to a report released last week by Front Line Defenders, a Dublin-based group that provides support for global human rights activists.

Nearly a quarter, 84, were targeted because of their often unpaid work protecting land and the environment. Those killings were documented in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, India, Indonesia, Peru, Philippines, Turkey, Somalia and Palestine.

Indigenous-rights defenders—often working on environmental issues but tracked separately from environmental defenders—accounted for another 17 percent of the killings documented by the group.

Beyond the killings, even more defenders faced threats and attacks ranging from surveillance and smear campaigns to arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, torture and killings. 

There were nearly 4,000 non-lethal attacks on human rights defenders across 119 countries last year, a figure that includes multiple violations against the same individual in some cases, according to the report. That number is likely a vast undercount, the authors said, because many attacks go unreported—and their perpetrators are rarely held accountable. 

“The imposition of internet blackouts, suppression of media, targeting of documenters, self-censorship, or the total closure of civic space” makes some cases impossible to document, the report said, highlighting countries including China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Iran that are politically restrictive, conflict-riven or both.

Human rights defenders are people who act peacefully to promote and protect any or all of the rights enshrined in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

Environmental defenders are often on the front lines of conflicts over mining, oil and gas development, logging and agribusiness, making them especially vulnerable to retaliation from governments, businesses and other legal and illegal actors.

Efraín Fueres, an Ecuadorian environmental defender, was among those killed last year. The 46-year-old community leader had participated in nationwide protests last fall amid a wave of pro-extractive-industry and authoritarian moves by the government. 

Videos posted to social media show Fueres gunned down while marching. A military vehicle then approached Fueres, who was lying in the street with a companion kneeling over his body. Armed officers surrounded the men and repeatedly kicked the companion.

Neither the Ecuadorian Consulate in Washington, D.C., nor the country’s public prosecutor’s office responded to requests for comment. 

Courts have recognized the legitimacy and importance of environmental defenders’ work, affirming that a healthy environment is a precondition for all other human rights, and that governments have legal obligations to address climate change and protect environmental defenders for that reason. 

“Respect for and guarantee of the rights of environmental human rights defenders is particularly important because they perform a task that is fundamental for strengthening democracy and the rule of law,” the Inter-American Court of Human Rights said in a landmark advisory opinion on climate change last year. 

That court noted that the role of environmental defenders is especially critical amid the ongoing climate crisis, given the scale of the challenge and the need for public involvement in decision-making.

Such court rulings build on a broader shift in the law: More than 165 countries have now recognized the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, providing a stronger legal basis for communities to challenge environmental harm and the systems that facilitate it.

Even so, environmental defenders are increasingly encountering overlapping networks of government officials, corporations, criminal groups and private security forces operating around extractive industries and land development—what the report called “economies of violence.”  

“Defenders who challenge land dispossession, extractive industries, or illicit economies often confronted the same networks of power, regardless of whether those activities were formally lawful or criminalised,” the authors wrote. 

In Ecuador, environmental defenders described to Inside Climate News remote regions where illegal miners often work inside areas designated for legal mining, creating tensions within communities divided over resource extraction. 

The country is also emblematic of a global trend highlighted in the report: governments and corporations increasingly relying on criminal charges, retaliatory lawsuits and other forms of legal harassment to stifle opposition. 

The authors of the new report said that in Ecuador, “The majority of criminalisation cases occurred within the context of socio-environmental conflicts where mining projects are imposed on communities without their free, prior and informed consent.” 

Last year, Ecuadorian officials temporarily froze the accounts of several of Ecuador’s most prominent environmental defenders, citing investigations into “unjust private enrichment” and “financing terrorism.” Some of those defenders have lost access to banking services as a result. 

Globally, more governments are labeling human rights defenders as terrorists or national security threats, stigmatizing their work to strip away legal protections and shut down their operations, the report says.

Colombia was the deadliest country for human rights defenders last year, with 165 killed, according to the report. That violence was driven by competition over land, resources and economic control in regions where armed groups, illegal mining and other extractive activities intersect, the report said. 

The authors highlighted the attempted assassination of Indigenous Wayúu leader Misael Socarrás Ipuana, whose vehicle came under gunfire from armed assailants while traveling in La Guajira on Colombia’s northern coast. Front Line Defenders said he was likely targeted because of his work documenting environmental damage and rights violations linked to the expansion of Latin America’s largest open-pit coal mine.

Glencore, the owner of the mine, said in a written statement that it rejects “any act of violence or intimidation against individuals who play a legitimate role in representing their communities and exercising their rights,” and that the company “activated the established protocol for addressing threats against social leaders” following the attack.

The report said Colombia’s conflict-resolution and peacebuilding initiatives were significantly weakened by significant aid cuts, particularly from the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The United Kingdom and Germany have also scaled back funding for civil society groups and vulnerable communities. 

Reductions in aid have also undermined the global system for protecting human rights defenders, the authors said. 

The Trump administration, the report additionally noted, withdrew from the U.N. Human Rights Council in February 2025 and opposed language related to gender rights in international negotiations. The moves coincided with growing concerns from rights groups that gains on women’s rights and protections for marginalized communities are increasingly under threat.

Women, and Indigenous women in particular, are often at the forefront of environmental defense—and face unique and varied threats. 

“President Trump has done more for human rights than Frontline Defenders ever could,” said White House assistant press secretary Olivia Wales in a written statement, asserting that “the United States remains the most generous country in the world.”   

Inside Climate News reported in August that the U.S. Department of State, which releases annual human rights reports on countries around the world, gutted mentions of “Indigenous” from those reports, with sections addressing alleged abuses against Indigenous peoples entirely removed.

Those sections in earlier years had emphasized credible allegations that some governments were failing to formally consult Indigenous communities about extractive projects—like oil, gas and mining—that affect them. The sections had also highlighted how land invasions and other illegal activities like logging affect Indigenous communities, as well as the danger Indigenous land defenders face. 

Front Line Defenders works with 14 partner organizations to verify the killings through interviews with family members and other local contacts, cross-checking with regional and international groups, and open-source research.

Front Line Defenders tracks non-lethal attacks on defenders separately, counting human rights violations reported to them. 

Katie Surma

Reporter, Pittsburgh

Katie Surma is a reporter at Inside Climate News covering the rights of nature movement and international environmental justice. Her work has a strong focus on the intersection of human rights and the environment. Before joining ICN, she practiced law, specializing in commercial litigation. Her journalism work has been recognized by the Overseas Press Club, the Society of International Journalists, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and others. Katie has a master’s degree in investigative journalism from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, an LLM in international rule of law and security from ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, a J.D. from Duquesne University, and was a History of Art and Architecture major at the University of Pittsburgh. Katie lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

• @katiesurma.bsky.social
• @Katie_Surma
• [email protected]