By Jettie Word | Director
In August our field manager was able to go to the ulu Baram and collect the final month of transect data. Travel between the city and remote communities has been tricky due to movement control orders to stop the spread of covid, and we’re very fortunate to be able to collect the remaining data.
The logging giant Samling Group has filed a $1.18 million defamation suit against our local Sarawak partners SAVE Rivers and its directors. Samling says its business has been harmed by web posts in which SAVE Rivers reported the company's failure to properly secure free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous communities in and around forest concessions. We believe this suit is strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPP), and is part of a growing international trend of silencing human rights and environmental defenders. We're committed to fighting this SLAPP suit and supporting community-led resistance to logging. In early September over 100 organizations wrote to Samling demanding that they drop the SLAPP suit.
More and more communities are joining the movement to Stop the Chop and resist industrial logging in Sarawak. In a joint action, representatives from a dozen Penan communities of Sarawak’s Upper Baram region stopped the bulldozers of Samling, the Malaysian logging giant that is rapidly encroaching into Sarawak’s remaining forests. According to community sources, a blockade was erected on September 9th on a logging road near Batu Siman, one of the state’s iconic mountain ranges in the middle of a planned protected area.
In solidarity,
Jettie Word
Director, The Borneo Project
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