Submission to the UK Environmental Audit Committee Inquiry on Sustainable Timber and Deforestation
FPP’s submission to the EAC
In September 2022, Forest Peoples Programme submitted a response to a parliamentary inquiry into Sustainable Timber and Deforestation launched by the UK Environmental Audit Committee (EAC).
The EAC sought views on the effectiveness of both the UK’s efforts to reduce global deforestation and the impact these would have on indigenous peoples and local communities, as well as the UK’s approach to working with international partners to tackle deforestation.
FPP’s submission underscored that deforestation is highly correlated with human rights abuses, particularly those related to the rights of indigenous peoples to land, territories and resources. It highlighted that any efforts to tackle deforestation by the UK - including laws, policies, overseas development assistance and trade initiatives - must take a human rights-based approach in order to more effectively tackle the root causes and underlying drivers of human rights violations and deforestation.
Not taking human rights into account when designing environmental policies and laws demonstrates a failure to grasp the centrality and importance of the role indigenous and forest peoples in protecting forests and biodiversity, and that their ability to do so effectively depends on the fulfilment of their collective rights, including their right to self-determination and right to determine their own development, as well as the recognition and protection of their values and traditional knowledge.
The submission touched on several UK policy areas that impact the human rights of indigenous peoples, including Schedule 17 of The Environment Act (2021) that seeks to regulate companies placing forest-risk agricultural commodities on the UK market. The submission emphasised that this law should have been devised to go beyond a narrow ‘legality’ approach (based on national laws) to explicitly include indigenous peoples’ human rights as articulated in international law. This was recommended to the UK government by the Global Resource Initiative in 2020.1
Lessons for future UK sustainable supply chain efforts
Lessons from previous iterations of demand-side laws need to be learnt. For example, the Timber and Timber Products Placing on the Market Regulations (UKTR) has demonstrated the shortcomings of taking a such a narrow ‘legality’ approach when it comes to ensuring the protection and fulfilment of indigenous peoples’ human rights.
In Indonesia, the only ‘producer country’ with which the UK currently has a Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA), the national Timber Legality Verification System (Sistem Verifikasi Legalitas Kayu – SVLK) issues certificates to timber companies deemed in compliance with national law. Timber products that enter the UK market with such certification are deemed to be compliant with the UKTR and FLEGT regulation, yet there is evidence of indigenous land tenure abuses by companies certified under this system.2 For example, the company PT Toba Pulp Lestari is certified despite displacing the Toba Batak people of North Sumatra from their customary land and converting their forests and agroecology systems to monoculture eucalyptus plantation for paper production.3
Given that the primary legislation for Schedule 17, The Environment Act (2021), is based on compliance with national land ownership and land use laws, several questions remain as to what impact the law will have on furthering the rights of indigenous peoples. It is now for secondary regulations, yet to be laid, to set out much of the crucial detail, including specifying whether any national level laws that protect customary rights-holders will be included. It is crucial that any laws relating to indigenous peoples’ customary rights, such as those protecting their right to free, prior and informed consent and right to land, territories and resources, are clearly specified and that businesses in scope of the law are required to comply with such laws.
It will also be vital that an effective third-party complaints system forms part of the enforcement regime put into place in the UK, rather than relying solely on enforcement in producer countries which is often weak. This should enable complaints to be made by affected indigenous peoples whose rights have been violated by companies directly to the enforcement regime in the UK. The regulator should have the experience and resources to be able to do its own investigations on the ground and there must be emphasis placed on supporting remedy that is meaningful to indigenous peoples in each specific context.
These are the minimum elements now necessary for Schedule 17 of The Environment Act (2021) to ensure at least some measure of promoting indigenous peoples’ human rights, even if still confined to contexts where these are protected, to one extent or another, in national level laws.
Since there is still a major loophole in Schedule 17 which means there is no protection for indigenous peoples’ rights in countries that do not adequately protect them in national legislation, a new law is needed in the UK. Such a law should require compliance by businesses across a wider range of sectors as well as financial institutions to respect human rights as articulated under international human rights law. A wide range of human rights organisations in the UK are calling for such a law, referred to as the ‘Business, Human Rights and Environment Act’.
The full submission is available on the Environmental Audit Committee’s website.
3. FPP report forthcoming
Overview
- Resource Type:
- News
- Publication date:
- 8 September 2022
- Programmes:
- Supply Chains and Trade Climate and forest policy and finance Law and Policy Reform Legal Empowerment Access to Justice