WWF sorry for alleged human rights abuses in nature reserves

CONSERVATION charity WWF has apologised for its role in alleged human rights abuses in Africa and Asia and has promised to pay compensation to victims.

The World Wildlife Fund also said it wanted to take responsibility for violent evictions of indigenous people and local communities from their homes by WWF-supported wildlife rangers or “ecoguards”.

In light of evidence of serious human rights abuses, the charity said it “unreservedly apologised” to local and indigenous communities affected.

The WWF International board, the charity’s governing body, also apologised to supporters, donors and volunteers for not having immediately disclosed allegations of human rights abuses in parks it supported.

The board said it had set aside $2m (£1.4m) to pay reparations to victims, and because it could not be sure of the scale of abuses WWF was implicated in, a further $5m (£3.5m) has been put aside for future claims.

WWF also said it was committed to transforming its approach with a new long-term strategy that prioritised indigenous people’s land rights and promoted community-led conservation across the areas it supports.

The move comes following an internal revision of the action the charity has taken in response to an independent expert report into allegations of human rights abuses in and around WWF-supported protected areas in six countries, which it commissioned in 2019 and which reported last November.

The allegations include murder, rape, torture and physical beatings by rangers and other law enforcement officials under the authority of governments in and around protected areas supported by WWF in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Nepal and India.

WWF admitted that its initial response to the report failed to adequately compensate victims or deal with shortcomings in the organisation or its partners that enabled the abuse.

Pavan Sukhdev, president of WWF International, the secretariat for the network of WWF organisations around the world, said: “There is no excuse and a formal apology is not enough. We can and need to do better.”

The report by the expert panel found WWF knew about alleged abuses in all protected areas in question, failed to investigate credible accusations in half of them, and continued to fund eco-guards alleged to have committed them.