ENVIRONMENT

Environmental damage can be a central component of communications despite the absence of express protections for the environment in UN human rights treaties. In Campo Agua’e Indigenous Community v Paraguay (2022),¹⁷⁶the Human Rights Committee found that Paraguay’s failure to prevent and control the toxic contamination of traditional lands, due to the intensive use of pesticides by nearby commercial farms, violated the Indigenous community’s Article 17 right to family life and home. The communication noted how the lack of State oversight of the agricultural activity at the source of the pollution ‘poisoned their waterways, destroyed their subsistence crops, killed their livestock, caused the mass extinction of fish, bees and prey and triggered health problems’.¹⁷⁷ It further referenced the authors’ rights under Article 27, whereby the serious environmental damage caused by the fumigation had severe repercussions amounting to a negation of the community’s right to enjoy their culture. The disappearance of the natural resources needed for their subsistence threatened ancestral practices in the areas of hunting, fishing, woodland foraging and Guarani agroecology, thus leading to the loss of traditional knowledge. More specifically, ceremonial aspects of baptism (mitakarai) were no longer practised owing to the disappearance of the materials from the forest needed to build the dance houses (jerokyha), of the avati para variety of corn with which they made the liquor (kagui) that constitutes a fundamental sacred ritual in the ceremony, and of the wax used to make the ceremonial candles due to the mass extinction of forest bees (jatei).¹⁷⁸ The loss of this ceremony had left children without a rite crucial to strengthening their cultural identity, and the last religious leaders (oporaiva) had been left without apprentices, threatening the preservation of the community’s cultural identity.¹⁷⁹

The Committee recalled that, in the case of Indigenous peoples, the enjoyment of culture may relate to a way of life which is closely associated with territory and the use of its resources, including such traditional activities as fishing or hunting. Thus, the protection of this right is directed towards ensuring the survival and continued development of the cultural identity.¹⁸⁰ It found that Article 27, ‘interpreted in the light of UNDRIP, enshrines the inalienable right of Indigenous peoples to enjoy the territories and natural resources that they have traditionally used for their subsistence and cultural identity’.¹⁸¹ The Committee found there to be a violation by the State party of Articles 17 and 27 of the Covenant. A concurring opinion criticised the decision for not engaging also the right to life. It held: ‘Some of these claims were presented by the authors and examined under Article 27 of the Covenant, which is an important step. Nevertheless, we consider that the serious consequences of the massive use of pesticides are imperfectly covered by this provision’, which should also have led to a violation of Article 6.¹⁸²

¹⁷⁶ UN Doc. CCPR/C/132/D/2552/2015 (2022).
¹⁷⁷ Ibid para 8.2.
¹⁷⁸ Ibid para 8.5.
¹⁷⁹ Ibid.
¹⁸⁰ Ibid para 8.6.
¹⁸¹ Ibid.
¹⁸² Ibid, Joint opinion of Committee members Arif Bulkan, Vasilka Sancin and Hélène Tigroudja (concurring), para 7.