The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, a partnership between the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), has filed a submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to a healthy environment describing a civic space that is closing around environmental defenders. The submission was published on 24 August 2026.
Where the submission is headed
The Special Rapporteur is gathering inputs for a report to the 64th session of the UN Human Rights Council. That report is to focus on the wide-ranging effects of the crackdown on environmental defenders on the realisation of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, and on what can actually be done to protect them.
The pattern described
The submission lists stigmatisation, harassment, surveillance, strategic lawsuits brought to shut down public participation, criminalisation, threats and attacks, and, at the far end, assassinations and enforced disappearances. It ties the worsening environmental crisis worldwide to intensifying repression of the people pressing for accountability, both for state violations and for business abuses affecting the right to a healthy environment.
Who these defenders are
The people covered by the submission work to protect ecosystems and a safe climate, water and watersheds, and sustainable food. Many are defending their own communities against fossil fuel extraction and mining projects. Their work is what gives practical content to a right more often asserted in treaty language than delivered on the ground.
Victories that stall at implementation
Coalitions of defenders and their organisations continue to win in court and through campaigning, but the political will to implement those results is missing, leaving landmark achievements unenforced. The submission also records psychological and physical risks it describes as unprecedented, present both in UN climate negotiations and at local level, and heaviest on defenders who belong to groups already in situations of marginalisation.
Who is asked to act
Responsibility is placed on states, regional institutions, companies, the UN itself and development finance institutions. Each, the submission says, must break the existing mould when it designs environmental policy, does business or launches new projects. It sets out the freedoms of expression, peaceful assembly and association as a precondition: guaranteeing them is what makes it possible to protect the people safeguarding the environment, and with it the other rights that depend on that protection.
This report was produced by the HuMedia newsroom.
