JAKARTA: Lockdowns to contain the Covid-19 (coronavirus) in South-East Asia have made farmers and indigenous people more vulnerable to losing their land, according to land rights activists who are backing new technologies to help track the growing number of conflicts.
More than 4.4 million people have been reported to be infected by the coronavirus globally and about 300,000 have died, according to a Reuters tally.
"Many conflicts are legacy issues of weak tenure rights and poor forest governance exacerbated by the current situation. But some are a result of companies moving ahead on controversial operations," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Land rights activists worldwide are at heightened risk now, with their access to justice also stymied because of the lockdowns, said Michel Forst, the former United Nations special rapporteur for human rights defenders.
Elsewhere in the region, with police and security forces engaged in enforcing lockdowns, cases of illegal logging have been reported in Nepal, Myanmar, Cambodia and Indonesia, said Ganz.
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