The Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) Judgement on State and Environmental Violence in West Papua was presented on 1st October at the 57th session of the UN Human Rights Council. The request which led to the public hearings held at Queen Mary University of London, from 27th to 29th June 2024, was put forward by the Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice (CCCCJ) and a network of international and Indonesian human and environmental rights’ organizations and associations. The event brought together human rights defenders and experts to reflect upon the ongoing human rights situation in West Papua and explored practical actions that the UN Human Rights Council, and national and international actors to address the deepening human rights and humanitarian crisis. The Permanent People’s Tribunal presented its findings on State and environmental violence in West Papua to NGOs and diplomats, including representatives of the Indonesian Permanent Mission to Geneva (see photo on top, source: WCC.
Indictment
The Tribunal was asked to deliberate on four charges levied against the Indonesian government, as well as foreign actors: land grabbing (a), violent repression and human rights violation (b), environmental degradation (c) and collusion between the Indonesian State and the national and foreign companies (d).
PPT Judgement
The judgement, which consists of eight sections – including the procedures adopted, the responses to the charges, and the deliberation and recommendations -, can be summarised in the following points:
- The Indigenous communities have suffered painful dispossession and have been deprived of elementary freedoms, such as that of movement, and deprived as well of economic rights.
- The system of prior consultation of the populations concerned, acquisition and verification of their informed consent is, since the controversial annexation referendum in 1969, manipulated by the State of Indonesia to achieve its own purposes and fails to guarantee any respect for the special relationship, economic but also spiritual, between West Papuan populations and their environments.
- Very serious cases and concrete data of human rights abuses were presented to the Tribunal. The Indigenous communities of West Papua live, according to one witness, in “the shadow of fear”. This condition has been constructed over the time via State crimes as well as grants of impunity for the perpetrators of those crimes.
- The effects on land, water, and forest have been severe, as result of the mining and agricultural activities, of the extraction and liquidification of natural gas, of deliberate deforestation for palm oil plantation, and of the recent food estate projects.
- The Tribunal considers that the ecological degradation can’t be disaggregated from State and corporate projects which are tending toward the obliteration of a people, or what was called by more than one witness a “slow genocide”.
- The Tribunal hear the implication of the business-State military nexus that characterizes the industrial activity in the region. It consists in a regime of terror, militarization, legal impunity, irregularities and restrictions on the conduct of human and livelihood as well as on exchanges of thought and information.
- In particular, the Indonesian National Army has become instrumental in the protection of State and corporate interests, in a way that involves repression against those who oppose or denounce the widely documented abuses. According to one witness, “they couldn’t take the land, so they needed to create a conflict”.
- The corporation considered in the indictment – including, among others, Freeport McMoRan, British Petroleum and its partners, and eleven palm oil corporations –, are directly implicated in the violence perpetrated against the Indigenous communities. This Tribunal also learned that Western States’ are implicated in the training Indonesian security forces, responsible of human rights abuses. The Tribunal therefore finds that not only the Indonesian State, but also States where these companies are based, need to be brought under international scrutiny.
