ACT NOW! and Jubilee Australia Research Centre are urging a United Nations Committee to act on human rights violations in PNG arising from illegal logging. The organisations have filed a formal request to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to consider taking urgent action at its next meeting in August. Bismarck Ramu Group has also endorsed the action.

The groups have stressed to the UN that there is pervasive, ongoing and irreparable harm to customary resource owners whose forests are being stolen by logging companies.

These abuses are systematic, institutionalised, and sanctioned by the PNG government through two specific tools: Special Agriculture and Business Leases (SABLs) and Forest Clearing Authorities (FCAs) – a type of logging license.

For over a decade since the Commission of Inquiry into SABLs, successive PNG governments have rubber stamped the large-scale theft of customary resource owners’ forests by upholding the morally bankrupt SABL scheme and expanding the use of FCAs. They have failed to revoke SABLs that were acquired fraudulently, with disregard to the law or without landowner consent. Meanwhile, logging companies have made hundreds of millions, if not billions, in ill-gotten gains by effectively stealing forests from customary resource owners using FCAs.

The complaint also highlights that the abuses are hard to challenge because PNG lack even a basic registry of SABLs or FCAs, and customary resource owners are denied access to information such as:

• The existence of an SABL or FCA over their forest. 
• A map of the boundaries of any lease or logging licence. 
• Information about proposed agricultural projects used to justify the SABL or FCA. 
• The monetary value of logs taken from forests. 
• The beneficial ownership of logging companies – to identify who ultimately profits from illegal logging.  

The only reason why foreign companies engage in illegal logging in PNG is to make money – it’s profitable because importing companies and countries are willing to accept illegally logged timber into their markets and supply chains. If they refused to take any more timber from SABL and FCA areas and demanded a public audit of the logging permits – the money would dry up. 

The groups hope that this UN attention will urge the international community to see this isn’t an issue of less-than-perfect forest law enforcement. This is a system, honed over decades, that is perpetrating irreparable harm on indigenous peoples across PNG through the wholesale violation of their rights and destroying their forests.

DOWNLOAD THE FULL URGENT ACTION REQUEST TO UNCERD