Environmental Human Rights: News & Updates

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has now ruled in favor of four communities harmed by the government of Honduras and outside investors.

The ancestral homelands of the Garífuna people are the coastal lands of northern Honduras and islands just off  the coast. In 2003 they began filing legal complaints with the the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (based in Washington, DC for their government’s violation of its cultural and territorial rights.  Now more than a decade since the first court ruling in their favor, the government of Honduras has failed to implement the court orders. A big stumbling block is that the communities that won their cases in the Inter-American Court (2015: Triunfo de la Cruz and Punta Piedra; 2023: San Juan) are fighting private corporations and foreign investors who have a lot at stake. Some have already illegally usurped lands and built tourist resorts, so it’s tricky to figure out how to return ancestral lands to the Garífuna people and compensate the companies and investors for their losses.

As Garífuna leaders have become more vocal after the 2015 ruling, the persecution against them has increased—surveillance, intimidation, violence, criminalization. Repression is expected to increase following the fourth favorable ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. On March 4, 2026, the international body “declared the State of Honduras responsible for the violation of the rights to collective property, participation, access to information, cultural identity, food and personal integrity of the Garífuna Community of Cayos Cochinos and its members.”

 Cayos Cochinos or Cochinos Cays consist of two small islands and 13 smaller coral cays situated 19 miles northeast of La Ceiba on the Atlantic coast of Honduras. The archipelago of cays is an ancestral home for the Garífuna people, whose subsistence, cultural identity and spiritual relationship are closely linked to the sea and artisanal fishing. Once the state declared the cays a protected environmental area, it authorized tourism and reality TV filming but restricted the Garífuna’s fishing rights. All of this done, of course, without prior, free and informed consultation of the community—in violation of international law.

This Equal exchange article examines how Fair Trade profits are reinvested into bio-fertilizers to tackle disease and climate change conditions on co-op run farms in peru.

Between 2015 and 2025, Honduras recorded 113 murders of environmental defenders, and nine out of ten cases remain unpunished, according to data from the Association for a More Just Society (ASJ). The departments of Colón, Yoro, and Atlántida account for the majority of these crimes, in territories marked by conflicts over land and natural resources. Meanwhile, environmental organizations and defenders denounce the lack of progress in investigations and the absence of state protection for those who defend the environment.

This nacla article sheds light on the Ch'orti' people's legal struggle against mining operations that contaminate their water and thus endanger their health and agricultural possibilities. 

The killing of Indigenous environmental defender Berta Cáceres on March 2, 2016 was not unique.  More than 1,000 people were killed for political reasons during the 12 years of the narco-dictatorship. The people of Honduras know that when communities organize in defense of their territories, they too often face militarization, repression, criminalization, and violence. But Berta’s assassination does remain as one of the most visible symbols of the risks borne by land and environmental defenders.  The behind-the-scenes plotting of her brutal assassination is slightly complicated but the  reasons very straight forward.  The narco-dictatorship that “opened up Honduras for business” tried to kill the organized resistance to their mega-projects (like the privatization of the Gualcarque River for foreign investors' hydro-electric project) that illegally dispossess Indigenous and campesino communities of land, water, and self-determination. 

How can we honor Berta?

For one, we can affirm the demand of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organization of Honduras (COPINH) that the intellectual authors of the assassination be brought to justice. Moreover, we can do what Berta would do. Live, organize, educate, work and struggle together. Reach out and support the too many victims of this violent, unjust and unequal global human order. Name, denounce and hold accountable the responsible actors—countries,  companies, wealthy elites, banks, investors and more. Organize, educate, work and struggle against all injustice, inequality and discrimination. Live with the knowledge that another world is indeed necessary and act as though we believe it is indeed possible.

To support IRTF’s accompaniment work with human rights and environmental defenders in Honduras, click here.

This article by Consortium News examines the Zones for Employment and Economic Development (ZEDEs) in Honduras and how tech billionaires like Peter Thiel profit of neocolonialist enclaves, allowed to have their own government, police force, courts, laws and any taxes collected, while indigenous people that have been dependent on that very land are subjected to exploitation, persecution and displacement.