Defending Indigenous Peoples Rights?

The Global Forest Coalition has always identified itself as a rights-based forest policy activist group.
Part of the rationale for the birth of the Global Forest Coalition was the need for a group that took the rights of Indigenous Peoples as a starting point in the fight to protect forests.

In the name of forest conservation, Indigenous Peoples have been forcibly relocated: moved away from their lands and territories and resettled in areas that are alien to them. This has sometimes happened with the consent, or even the involvement, of forestry conservation organizations.

The foundation members of the GFC believe this is an abuse of fundamental human rights and in conflict with the need to create support for forest protection amongst a broader community. We believe that people will ignore laws and policies that they see as elitist and fundamentally flawed. Thus both forest protection and Indigenous and human rights suffer from this approach.

Many of our members (including regional and Indigenous focal points) have been centrally located in the struggle for the protection of Indigenous and other human rights. As an example of this, the GFC has created three focal point positions in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Two of the focal points, Marcial Arias and Hubertus Samangun, are members of the International Alliance of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples. The African focal point position is shared by Jennifer Koinante and Sada Albachir of the Indigenous Peoples African Coordinating Committee.

In addition to these two positions, the regional focal point for Oceania strongly identifies as Indigenous.

The GFC newsletter has articles of specific interest to Indigenous Peoples and all of our officers and employees are supportive of the struggle for Indigenous rights. Our belief in a rights-based conservation approach is not something we only preach, it is something we practice.