Indonesian Civil Society Organizations Sound Alarm on FSC's Remedy Framework Implementation

A coalition of twelve concerned Indonesian Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and Forest Peoples Programme has sounded the alarm on the implementation of the Forest Stewardship Council's (FSC) new Remedy Framework to redress the social harms associated with the giant pulp and paper companies, APRIL and APP.

Read the full letter here

In a letter addressed to FSC Board of Directors, CSOs highlighted:

• the lack of outreach by FSC to inform impacted indigenous communities about the Remedy Framework process ;
• the absence of funding to support communities in engaging effectively with the process, despite repeated calls for the establishment of a suitable fund ;
• the risk of the methodology employed by Independent Assessors for conducting the social baseline assessment being in violation of FSC standard to uphold human rights and respect the customary rights of indigenous communities ;
• the insufficient time allocated to conduct FPIC-based social assessments and the lack of participation of impacted communities prior to the initial social baseline assessments being shared with APRIL ;
• the flaws of the sampling approach of Third Party Verifiers will mean that the FPIC process in most impacted communities will remain unverified; and
• the lack of input from civil society or the impacted communities to the methodologies developed by APRIL and APP to determine impacted communities and the harms they have suffered due to industrial forest conversion.

These concerns reflect a shared commitment to ensuring that the Remedy Framework is implemented in a manner that upholds human rights and the rights of indigenous peoples.

It is hoped the FSC Board of Directors will take immediate action to address these points and ensure the roll out of the FSC Remedy Framework aligns with international human rights law and FSC’s own Principles and Criteria and FPIC guide.