At issue are the reported murders of 23 local farmers who tried to recover land, which they say was illegally sold to big palm oil plantations, such as Grupo Dinant, in a country scarred by widespread human rights abuses.
In July, a report by an International Fact Finding Mission was presented to the European Parliament’s Human Rights Sub-committee, alleging that 23 peasants, one journalist and his partner, had all been murdered in the Bajo Aguán region, between January 2010 and March 2011.
The deaths were facilitated by the “direct involvement of private security guards from some of the local companies who are complicit with police and military officials,” the report said.
In some cases it cited “feigned accidents” in which peasants were run over by security guards working for two named palm oil businessmen. In other cases, the farmers were simply shot, or “disappeared”.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will be holding a hearing into the report on 24 October, and a delegation of MEPs will be visiting the region between 31 October and 4 November.
But because of a three-year gap between the stakeholder consultation process and the biogas project approvals, the CDM board recently ruled that the project had met the criteria of its mandate.
“We are not investigators of crimes,” a board member told EurActiv. “We had to take judgements within our rules – however regretful that may be – and there was not much scope for us to refuse the project. All the consultation procedures precisely had been obeyed.”
via Carbon credits tarnished by human rights ‘disgrace’ | EurActiv.