The WWF accepts “pity” for human rights violations

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One of the world’s largest charities knew it had been funding alleged human rights violators for years, but repeatedly failed to solve the problem, a report that was long delayed on Tuesday revealed.

BuzzFeed News research It was first explained in March 2019 that WWF, a beloved nonprofit with a little panda logo, funded and supplied park rangers on charges of beating, torturing, sexually assaulting and murdering many people. In response, WWF immediately to order an “independent review,” led by former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay.

A 160-page review, which has now been made published online, BuzzFeed News confirms the problems presented Nepal, Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, and Democratic Republic of the Congo. The report says the panel was prevented COVID-19 from traveling to places where pandemic abuses occurred.

According to the review, the WWF has repeatedly failed to meet its “commitments to respect human rights,” as well as fulfilling commitments that are essential to the law but also to “nature conservation”.

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In one statement In response to the review, WWF noted “deep grief and unreservedness for those who have suffered,” and said that the abuse of park rangers “frightens us and goes against all the values ​​we stand for.” The charity acknowledged its shortcomings and welcomed the recommendations, saying “we can and will do more”.

Pillay’s review declined to clarify whether they were top executives found by BuzzFeed News aware of the “acceleration” of violence at least one wildlife park, at least in January 2018, were the wrong steps for charity.

In the Congo Basin, when the WWF worked “particularly weakly” in fulfilling its human rights commitments, wildlife charities did not fully investigate allegations of murder, rape and torture, fearing members of the government would “react negatively to the investigation effort.” past human rights violations, ”the panel found. Here and elsewhere, WWF provided technical and financial assistance to park rangers, known as local“ ecological guards, ”even after experiencing similar horrific allegations, and in some cases damn criticism the nonprofit organization itself had confirmed the “serious and widespread” allegations of ill-treatment.

The report found that “there was no formal mechanism to report alleged abuses to WWF on anti-hunting missions” in Nepal, despite allegations of torture, rape and murder from the early 2000s to the last July, when park officials the beating of an indigenous youth and destroyed the houses of a local community. “The WWF needs to know what’s going on in the territory where it works” in order to comply with its own human rights policies, the report says.

Overall, the WWF paid too much attention to allegations of abuse because it did not build a system for reporting victims and made too rosy a picture of the war on capture in public communications, the report found. “Unfortunately, the WWF’s commitments to implement its social policies have not been properly and consistently met,” the report’s authors wrote.

The WWF has made efforts to tackle wildlife crime for decades. Although local governments officially employ and pay for park rangers who protect national parks and wildlife protection reserves, in several African and Asian countries the WWF has provided key funding to make its work possible. Charity has formed a crusade against hunting in the harsh conditions of war.

In one multi-series series, BuzzFeed News found that the WWF’s war on hunting happened with civilians killed: poor people living near parks. At the time, WWF responded that many of BuzzFeed’s assertions “do not match the understanding of the facts”; however, the charity changed immediately after the publication of many human rights policies.

In the US, the series encouraged bilateral research proposed legislation that would prohibit the government from providing money to international conservation groups that fund or protect human rights violations. A also asked freezing funds to the Department of the Interior, A study by the Government Accountability Office, and separate government probes in the UK and Germany.

The new review provides more recommendations to charities to improve oversight, including hiring more human rights specialists, engaging responsibly before committing to conservation projects, signing human rights commitments with the WWF government and law enforcement partners, and establishing an effective complaint. to make it easier for indigenous systems to report abuse.

According to the review, there was no “joint and unified effort” in the WWF’s worldwide network of offices to “address complaints about human rights violations” around the world until 2018.

Many of the jury’s findings were directed to the top: “Commitments to fulfill the responsibility to respect human rights should be accepted at the highest level of the institution,” the board wrote. Although all WWF offices in the Congo Basin are under the direct control of WWF International, staff at Gland headquarters in Switzerland did little to oversee the work of the organization.

WWF International also did not provide clear guidance to local offices on how to implement human rights commitments. For example, there were no rules for the entire network with law enforcement and parks. As a result, each program office was “left to its own devices – or not – to develop codes of conduct, training materials, conditions to assist guards, and procedures for responding to allegations of abuse.”

“Ultimately, it was the responsibility of the WWF International and the WWF Network in general to provide financial and technical support to the WWF to ensure that allegations of human rights violations by eco-guardians were properly addressed,” the panel wrote.

BuzzFeed News unveiled CEO Marco Lambertini and chief operating officer Dominic O’Neill last October personally review A report commissioned by the WWF that documents “accelerating” accounts of WWF-sponsored guard violence in Cameroon. That report was sent to top executives in January 2018, a year before BuzzFeed News began showing similar abuses. However, Pillay’s review said little about whether WWF’s management charity was responsible for the charity’s failures.

Instead, the review was based on WWF’s complex system, according to which individual program offices are involved with countries with “apparently very limited consultation or oversight of WWF International,” even when WWF International has legal responsibility. This obscured “clear lines of responsibility and accountability” and resulted in “difficulties and confusion” and “effective” attempts to address human rights, the panel wrote.

The panel was unable to find a single contract between WWF International and its partner countries that contained provisions on human rights responsibilities or indigenous rights.

The jury criticized the WWF’s press releases at length, saying it was “about the challenges it faces” and “more transparent” about “how it responds to allegations of human rights violations related to the activities it supports.” In some cases, “it is clear that he decided not to publish the WWF-mandated reports, to reduce the information received, or to overestimate the effectiveness of the proposed responses.”

It seems that the internal approach to promoting “good news” has “led to a culture”; the program offices “did not want to expand or increase their knowledge about allegations of human rights violations, by scaring away donors or insulting partner states,” the report says. “WWFs around the world need to be more transparent about the challenges they face both internally and externally in promoting conservation and respecting human rights. Equally important, it needs to be more accurate about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of its efforts to overcome these challenges. ”

The report drew immediate criticism from reputable voices who said it did not fully accept responsibility for abuses against indigenous charities. Stephen Corry, director of Survival International, the tribal rights advocacy group, said the report “includes previous responses from the WWF” when the government guard “passed the blame.”

A spokesman for the Rainforest Foundation UK said WWF International’s response to the report “does not take responsibility” for the WWF’s shortcomings “or offers sincere apologies to many people who have suffered human rights violations on its behalf”.

The Forest Peoples Program, an indigenous rights group that has denounced abuses against the WWF, said the report shows the need to give all wildlife charities a hard look at themselves.

“The human rights violations suffered by indigenous peoples and local communities listed in the report highlight key issues that arise throughout the conservation sector, which are not isolated to the WWF,” said Helen Tugendhat, program coordinator for the Forest Peoples Program. “We urge other conservation organizations and conservation funders to read this report carefully and to evaluate and change their practices.”