An international court published its ruling this month that the Ecuadorian government was responsible for a long list of human rights violations against uncontacted Indigenous communities in the Amazon Rainforest. It’s the first case of its kind examining protections for people who live outside of regular contact with the rest of the world. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) ruled that the government violated numerous rights of the Tagaeri and Taromenane Indigenous peoples and failed to prevent violent attacks against them. The historic decision should improve safeguards for people living in voluntary isolation in Ecuador and beyond, activists said. “This ruling is very important,” Pedro Bermeo, a spokesperson for YASunidos, an anti-extractives group and co-petitioner in the case, told Mongabay. “It marks a ‘before and after’ in the lives of uncontacted peoples — not only in Ecuador, not even just in Latin America, but in the world.” The office of the president and the Ministry of the Environment, Water and Ecological Transition didn’t respond to a request for comment. The nomadic Tagaeri and Taromenane rely on hunting and gathering in the Amazon Rainforest of eastern Ecuador, but the area has also been an attractive location for oil development. Several of the country’s largest oil fields, including Blocks 31 and 43, are located on Indigenous peoples’ ancestral land. The IACHR during the trial in August 2022. Photo courtesy of IACHR/Flickr. In 1999, the government banned extractive activities on some ancestral land through the creation of the approximately 7,000-square-kilometer (2,700-square-mile) Tagaeri…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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