A new report found that environmental defenders are increasingly encountering overlapping networks of government officials, corporations, criminal groups and private security forces.
Environmental Defenders Among World’s Most Targeted Activists
Katie Surma / Inside Climate News
(June 22, 2026) — Environmental and Indigenous rights defenders remained among the world’s most targeted human rights advocates in 2025, despite landmark rulings by international courts affirming governments’ obligations to protect both the environment and those who defend it.
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 provides support for 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 the killings, even more defenders faced threats and attacks ranging from surveillance and smear campaigns to arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, torture and killings.
There were nearly 4,000 non-lethal attacks on human rights defenders across 119 countries last year, a figure that includes multiple violations against the same individual in some cases, according to the report. That number is likely a vast undercount, the authors said, because many attacks go unreported—and their perpetrators are rarely held accountable.
“The imposition of internet blackouts, suppression of media, targeting of documenters, self-censorship, or the total closure of civic space” makes some cases impossible to document, the report said, highlighting countries including China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Iran that are politically restrictive, conflict-riven or both.
Human rights defenders are 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 are often on the front lines of conflicts over mining, oil and gas development, logging and agribusiness, making them especially vulnerable to retaliation from governments, businesses and other legal and illegal actors.
Efraín Fueres, an Ecuadorian environmental defender, was among those killed last year. The 46-year-old community leader 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. A military vehicle then approached Fueres, who 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.
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.
“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 Inter-American Court of Human Rights said in a landmark advisory opinion on climate change last year.
That court noted that the role of environmental defenders is especially critical amid the ongoing climate crisis, given the scale of the challenge and the need for public involvement in decision-making.
Such court rulings build on a broader shift in the law: More than 165 countries have now recognized the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, providing a stronger legal basis for communities to challenge environmental harm and the systems that facilitate it.
Even so, environmental defenders are increasingly encountering overlapping networks of government officials, corporations, criminal groups and private security forces operating around extractive industries and land development—what the report called “economies of violence.”
“Defenders who challenge land dispossession, extractive industries, or illicit economies often confronted the same networks of power, regardless of whether those activities were formally lawful or criminalised,” the authors wrote.
In Ecuador, environmental defenders described to Inside Climate News remote regions where illegal miners often work inside areas designated for legal mining, creating tensions within communities divided over resource extraction.
The country is also emblematic of a global trend highlighted in the report: governments and corporations increasingly relying on criminal charges, retaliatory lawsuits and other forms of legal harassment to stifle opposition.
The authors of the new report said 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.”
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