Protected Areas

Other information 22 August 2024
The African Commission of Human and Peoples Rights recently made public its historic ruling on the Indigenous Batwa Peoples’ right to return to their ancestral home from which they were violently evicted, when the Kahuzi-Biega National Park was created in Eastern DR Congo.
Bulletin articles 25 October 2023
With the support of international funding, the establishment of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park has led to the forced and violent eviction of the Batwa Indigenous People. The DRC government recently passed a new law on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, which, though a step forward, does not apply to lands that have already been designated as protected areas, nor does it make any mention of historic injustices.
Bulletin articles 14 May 2020

A group of riparian Batwa people, exasperated by the extreme poverty following their eviction in order to establish the Kahuzi Biega National Park, decided to return to their ancestral forests. Since then, they regularly clash with the “eco-guards,” sometimes leading to the loss of human lives.

Bulletin articles 30 September 2019

The government claims that small-scale agriculture is responsible for deforestation. But this claim ignores government policies that drive land-use changes and destructive markets as well as the exclusion of indigenous peoples through the creation of reserves.

Bulletin articles 14 May 2019

Serious abuses in DRC’s Salonga National Park at the hands of park rangers supported by funding from the WWF and a range of international donors are just the latest to be documented. This is a wider problem on human rights abuses and colonial interventions in forests.

Bulletin articles 13 July 2016