Environmental defenders remain among world’s most targeted activists

environmental defenders – A new report says 358 human rights defenders were killed in 2025, with 84 murdered because of their land and environmental work and Indigenous rights defenders making up a further 17%. The violence sits alongside nearly 4,000 nonlethal attacks across 119 count

For many of the people who speak up on behalf of forests, rivers, and ancestral land, 2025 did not bring protection. It brought targeting.

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 supports 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 those deaths, the report describes a far wider trail of harm. Even when defenders survived, they faced threats and attacks that ranged from surveillance and smear campaigns to arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, torture, and killings.

The scale is stark even before you consider what may be missing. The report says there were nearly 4,000 nonlethal attacks on human rights defenders across 119 countries last year. In some cases, it counts multiple violations against the same person. The authors warn the figure is likely a vast undercount because many attacks go unreported and perpetrators are rarely held accountable.

Some environments make documentation nearly impossible. The report points to tactics such as internet blackouts, suppression of media, targeting of documenters, self-censorship, or the total closure of civic space—citing countries including China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Iran.

Human rights defenders are defined in the report as 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, the report notes, often work at the front lines of conflicts over mining, oil and gas development, logging, and agribusiness. That work puts them in the path of retaliation from governments, businesses, and other legal and illegal actors.

One Ecuadorian killing captured how quickly activism can turn fatal. Efraín Fueres, a 46-year-old community leader, was among those killed last year. He 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. After he fell, a military vehicle approached. Fueres 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.

The danger facing defenders is not happening in a legal vacuum. 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.

In a landmark advisory opinion on climate change last year. the Inter-American Court of Human Rights said. “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 court also noted that the defenders’ role is especially critical amid the ongoing climate crisis. given the scale of the challenge and the need for public involvement in decision-making.

The report links those rulings to a broader shift in international law: more than 165 countries have recognized the human right to a clean. healthy. and sustainable environment. That recognition is described as providing a stronger legal basis for communities to challenge environmental harm and the systems that facilitate it.

Still, the report argues, defenders are increasingly confronting overlapping networks of government officials, corporations, criminal groups, and private security forces operating around extractive industries and land development—what the report calls “economies of violence.”

In those cases, the report says defenders who challenge land dispossession, extractive industries, or illicit economies often confront the same networks of power, regardless of whether the activities are formally lawful or criminalized.

Ecuador is presented as one example of the pressure inside communities themselves. Environmental defenders described to Inside Climate News remote regions where illegal miners work inside areas designated for legal mining, creating tensions within communities divided over resource extraction.

The report also highlights legal harassment as a tool of control. It says that in Ecuador, governments and corporations increasingly rely on criminal charges, retaliatory lawsuits, and other forms of legal harassment to stifle opposition.

The authors add 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.

environmental defenders human rights defenders 2025 killings Front Line Defenders Indigenous rights climate change law Inter-American Court of Human Rights economies of violence socio-environmental conflicts