Tagdumahan
Tagdumahan Indigenous Peoples' Organization is a group actively campaigning for the protection of the ancestral lands of the Banwaon community from logging and mining. One of the organisation’s leaders, Necasio ‘Angis’ Precioso, was killed on 22 December 2014, while two of its members were shot down on 12 August 2016 in the village of Balit.
The climate of impunity that prevails in the Philippines, combined with the administration’s encouragement of extra-judicial killings of alleged drug users as well as the increasingly hard line taken by the army towards the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, has resulted in the serious deterioration in the situation for human rights defenders in the country. Since the election of President Rodrigo Duterte in May 2016, HRDs are facing a spate of killings and violence. Judicial harassment and criminalisation of HRDs remain common, with politicians and private actors, such as mining companies, using the criminal justice system to silence those who oppose their interests.
