Caribbean & Central America - February 2022

The United Nations (UN) Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Honduras and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) have both condemned the recent killing of Pablo Isabel Hernández, a local indigenous Lenca leader, activist and human rights defender (HRD). His murder has underlined a key priority for the new Honduran government – addressing violence targeting HRDs.

According to an OHCHR statement dated 10 January, Hernández was killed the previous day in San Marcos de Caiquín municipality, Lempira department, when unknown men shot him in the back while he was going to church. The director of a local radio station Radio Comunitaria Tenán, Hernández was president of the network of agroecologists of the Cacique Lempira Biosphere and a sponsor of a local indigenous university, Universidad Indígena Lenca y de los Pueblos, among other things.

The OHCHR statement highlighted that he had served as director of the radio station for five years which he had used as a platform to question the local San Marcos de Caiquín government. He also retransmitted the programme “Voces contra el olvido” (Voices against forgetting) made by local human rights group Comité de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras (Cofadeh). Hernández had publicly reiterated concerns regarding the risks he faced along with threats to close the community media outlet.

In its statement, OHCHR highlighted that Hernández is the first HRD to be murdered in Honduras this year. It registered violent incidents against at least 208 HRDs and 93 journalists in 2021, of which ten were murders. Meanwhile the latest (September 2021) annual report from international NGO Global Witness registered 17 environmental HRDs killed in Honduras in 2020, up from 14 in 2019 and four in 2018.

•  Guapinol defenders

On 14 January the high-profile trial began of eight environmental defenders, Porfirio Sorto Cedillo, José Avelino Cedillo, Orbin Naún Hernández, Kevin Alejandro Romero, Arnold Javier Alemán, Ever Alexander Cedillo, Daniel Marquez, and Jeremías Martínez Díaz. On 9 February all bar Alemán and Díaz were convicted with the other two acquitted. However in a supreme court ruling on 10 February, the convictions against the six were thrown out.

   Since 1 September 2019, the eight HRDs had been in pre-trial detention for charges related due to their work in defence of the San Pedro and Guapinol rivers. They were placed in pre-trial detention for opposing an iron oxide mine inside a protected national park in Tocoa, a municipality in the northern Colón department. The HRDs come from the community of Guapinol on the Guapinol River, which is polluted by the mine, and belong to the Comité Municipal de Defensa de los Bienes Comunes y Públicos (CMDBCP), a network of local groups dedicated to land and environmental defence.

 The case had long attracted international attention and the CSJ’s decision to overturn the convictions was well received by human rights institutions. In November 2021, UN human rights experts including Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, urged Honduras, elected to the UN Human Rights Council the previous month, to release the eight defendants in line with recommendations made by another UN body, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) in February 2021.

   In April 2020 members of the European Parliament sent a letter to then President Juan Orlando Hernández (2014-2022) which said that this pre-trial detention has “no sound legal justification” and constitutes “judicial harassment of the defenders in the absence of clear incriminating evidence against them”. END BOX

• Global witness

A 10 December 2021 blog post by Global Witness underlines that Honduras remains one of the most dangerous countries for environmental defenders, with nearly 140 murdered since 2012 – and many more being criminalised simply for standing up for their rights to their land and a healthy environment.