Legal Aid Fund:
The Borneo Project’s Legal Aid Fund enables indigenous communities of Sarawak to pursue legal action to defend their customary lands and resources. The Fund also supports the Sarawak Indigenous Lawyers Alliance’s work on behalf of Borneo communities protecting their land, forests, farms, rivers, and sustainable livelihoods.
Over the past thirty years, Borneo communities dependent on forests, subsistence agriculture, and small scale agroforestry for commercial crops have protested the takeover of their lands for logging and large-scale corporate plantations — most recently for oil palm and fast growing timber. Communities have also organized to oppose unnecessary construction of huge hydroelectric dams which destroy not only huge swathes of rainforest, but also the sustainable livelihoods of riverside villages and forest-dwelling communities. Indigenous communities have protested the theft and degradation of their land and resources through petitions, demonstrations, blockades, political organizing, community resource mapping and numerous local initiatives. Now they have turned to the courts, with some 200 lawsuits in Sarawak alone aimed at defending customary land and resource rights.
Under Malaysian law, and especially under Sarawak state land law, native communities have the right to decide how lands are used in their customary territories. State agencies collusive with industry insist on the government’s “right” to develop land for the “benefit of all”. But profits from deforesting and developing much of the land expropriated from community control accrue to just a few tycoons, politicians, and their families and cronies.
Inspired by recent court rulings that favor Native Customary Rights, many other communities hope to defend their land rights through legal action, but cannot afford initial filing fees, or high costs of preparing effective evidence to support their claims at trial. (This includes mapping land and resources under customary uses and management, as well as affadavits documenting oral histories of land uses and claims.)
Donations to the Borneo Project will help offset communities’ court fees and other court costs, and help them prepare effective evidence to support their cases. In 2011, Sarawak civil society organizations and land rights lawyers will help The Borneo Project identify lawsuits for Legal Aid Fund.
Read more here: Courts OK broad definition of Native Land, by Judith Mayer, The Borneo Wire, December 2010
Click here to donate to support our work on Indigenous Land Protection
