"World Bank's Draft Safeguards Fail to Protect Land Rights: Major Revisions Required", 25 July 2014

At last year’s Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, the Bank publicly committed to ensuring that its new environmental and social safeguards would be informed by the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Forest and Fisheries...Yet, the draft Environmental and Social Framework currently under consideration fails to reflect the Voluntary Guidelines in every important way and fails to adequately respond to or incorporate years of input from civil society and experts around the world. Not only does the draft Framework fail to include a comprehensive set of safeguard standards on land tenure and land rights...alarmingly, it actually acts to narrow the scope of the current policies and weaken land rights protections for poor and vulnerable groups.