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Environmental and Indigenous rights defenders remained among the world’s most targeted human rights advocates in 2025, despite landmark rulings by international courts affirming governments’ obligations to protect both the environment and those who defend it.

At least 358 human rights defenders were killed last year, according to a report released last week by Front Line Defenders, a Dublin-based group that provides support for global human rights activists.

Nearly a quarter, 84, were targeted because of their often unpaid work protecting land and the environment. Those killings were documented in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, India, Indonesia, Peru, Philippines, Turkey, Somalia and Palestine.

Indigenous-rights defenders — often working on environmental issues but tracked separately from environmental defenders — accounted for another 17 percent of the killings documented by the group.

Beyond the killings, even more defenders faced threats and attacks ranging from surveillance and smear campaigns to arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, torture and killings.

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There were nearly 4,000 non-lethal attacks on human rights defenders across 119 countries last year, a figure that includes multiple violations against the same individual in some cases, according to the report. That number is likely a vast undercount, the authors said, because many attacks go unreported — and their perpetrators are rarely held accountable.

“The imposition of internet blackouts, suppression of media, targeting of documenters, self-censorship, or the total closure of civic space” makes some cases impossible to document, the report said, highlighting countries including China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Iran that are politically restrictive, conflict-riven or both.

Human rights defenders are people who act peacefully to promote and protect any or all of the rights enshrined in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Environmental defenders are often on the front lines of conflicts over mining, oil and gas development, logging and agribusiness, making them especially vulnerable to retaliation from governments, businesses and other legal and illegal actors.

Efraín Fueres, an Ecuadorian environmental defender, was among those killed last year. The 46-year-old community leader had participated in nationwide protests last fall amid a wave of pro-extractive-industry and authoritarian moves by the government.

Videos posted to social media show Fueres gunned down while marching. A military vehicle then approached........

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