In 2025, people all over the world took courageous action to address intersecting global crises including accelerating climate breakdown, expanding armed conflict, democratic backsliding, and the consolidation of corporate power. The Business and Human Rights Centre documented nearly 800 attacks (790) against defenders in 80 countries raising concerns about business. This is more than two attacks on average every day and more than we’ve tracked in a single year since 2020. Nearly one third of attacks (30%) were against Indigenous Peoples, who comprise just 6% of the world’s population.

Over the past decade, HRDs have courageously organised to stop corporate abuse and prevent business activities from causing harm – exposing human rights and environmental violations, demanding accountability, and advocating for rights-respecting economic practices. From January 2015 to December 2024, the Business and Human Rights Centre recorded more than 6,400 attacks across 147 countries against people who voiced concerns about business-related risks or harms. This is close to two attacks on average every day over the past ten years. In 2024 alone, we tracked 660 attacks.

From fighting deforestation and illegal mining in the Amazon to raising concerns about the impacts of megaprojects in Mexico and protecting sacred Indigenous sites in Nicaragua, communities, workers and individuals are courageously protecting their rights and environments across Latin America and the Caribbean. Unfortunately, in doing this important work, they face significant risks. Latin America and the Caribbean is one of the most dangerous regions in the world for human rights defenders (HRDs). Between January 2015 and December 2022 (inclusive), we identified nearly 2,000 attacks against HRDs in Latin America and the Caribbean, representing 42% of total attacks (4,700) recorded worldwide.

The protection of human rights defenders (HRDs) in relation to business activities is vital. HRDs play a crucial role in safeguarding human rights and environmental standards against adverse impacts of business operations globally. Despite their essential work, defenders frequently face severe risks, including threats, surveillance, legal and judicial harassment, and violence. This report summarises and assesses progress and challenges over the past decade in relation to initiatives to protect human rights defenders in the context of business frameworks, guidance, initiatives and tools that have emerged at local, national and regional levels.

Every day, people across the globe raise concerns about business-related harm to their communities, environments and rights, sometimes at great personal cost. These defenders face a range of attacks, including abuse of legal systems, to deter peaceful protest and stop their legitimate human rights work. Judicial harassment – including strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs – has made up more than half of the attacks against human rights defenders raising concerns about business practice since we began tracking in 2015. This form of abuse presents a grave threat to defenders’ participation in peaceful public discourse around operations and activities which affect their lives.

Between January 2015 and August 2022, we tracked 883 attacks on Indigenous human rights defenders, including killings, threats, arbitrary detention, and strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs). Nearly all (95%) of attacks against Indigenous defenders between January 2015 and August 2022 were on climate, land and environmental defenders, compared with just two-thirds (63%) for non-Indigenous defenders. This data helps show how Indigenous Peoples play an outsized role in the protection of land, water and forests, and the disproportionate risks they face.

The Indigenous community of Santa Clara de Uchunya is allegedly divided: while part of its members, including some leaders, support the operations of the palm oil company Ocho Sur since its arrival in 2016, others oppose its activities. Those who oppose Ocho Sur claim that the company is encouraging fragmentation within the community, as well as facilitating the invasion of its ancestral territory and the neglect of its opponents by the media.

In April 2026, mining companies were reportedly involved in exploitation of and violence against Indigenous Peoples in the Caraga region, Philippines. While reportedly operating with impunity, mining companies such as Marcventures Mining and Development Corp., Taganito Mining Corp. and Platinum Group Metals Corp. were allegedly moved into ancestral lands, where their mining activities allegedly cause environmental damage. Against the backdrop of environmental issues, Indigenous and anti-mining activists were killed in a recorded number.

The Mphanda Nkuwa (MNK) dam project on the Zambezi River allegedly poses severe social, environmental, and human rights risks, threatening over 1,400 families (at least 8,120 people) with forced displacement while disrupting fishing, farming, and livestock-dependent communities through flooding and altered river flows. Cultural heritage sites face submersion, downstream populations of about 350,000 in the Zambezi Delta risk food insecurity from lost floodplain agriculture—repeating harms seen with the Cahora Bassa dam—and locals report a repressive environment of threats, detentions, and suppressed expression.

The three reports by UN Special Rapporteur Michel Forst under the Aarhus Convention provide a comprehensive account of the threats faced by environmental defenders across the globe. The first report documents 95 complaints received between June 2022 and September 2025, detailing cases of penalisation, persecution and harassment for exercising environmental rights. The second report presents findings from 10 regional consultations with 172 environmental defenders from 53 countries. The third report synthesises key trends and threats identified across complaints and consultations, highlighting the systemic nature of retaliation against environmental defenders.

Civil society organisations have raised human rights and environmental concerns about the Reko Diq copper mine in Balochistan, Pakistan. The mine is operated by Reko Diq Mining Company (RDMC) and owned 50% by Barrick Mining Corporation, 25% by Pakistan's federal government, and 25% by the Government of Balochistan. Organisations highlighted that the project takes places in an intensely militarised region, where civic space is extremely closed and where reprisals against civil society actors are systematic, making effective stakeholder engagement "virtually impossible."

The Network of people affected by mining in Mexico has stated that Canadian mining company Equinox Gold took control of the Los Filos mine at the beginning of 2020 and since then has been unable to maintain a respectful relationship with the community, which has meant that the community land owners of Carrizalillo have decided to break the agreement they signed in 2019 that should have lasted for 6 years.