🏾 In the Philippines, peasants, Indigenous communities and other social movements, are systematically criminalized for their struggles to protect their land from corporations. The newest case study from our Land Struggle Series zooms in on the struggle of a group of peasants from Sumalo, Philippines, whose 214 hectares of land was occupied by the wealthy Litton family. The Littons, operating as the Riverforest Development Corporation, had bought the land from the Philippines’ late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, while it was already occupied by a group of small-scale farmers. Over the three-decade long legal battle for the land, the corporation used legal tactics against the peasants, leading to their criminalization, detainment, displacement, demolishment of their houses and, in 2019, the lethal shooting of a young farmer. In February 2023, nine peasants, eight of them women and four elderlies, have been charged with false accusations and are under arrest.⚖️ Whilst the peasants have finally won their battle in 2021, the Philippines remains the worst place in Asia for land and environmental defenders, with 270 defenders killed between 2012 and 2021, according to a report by @Global_witness. As long as land rights are not tightly bound to human rights and legally protected on the national level, this criminalization of land struggles remains commonplace. Read the article via the link in our bio! With the support of @focussouth#WeBelongToTheLand #LandStruggleSeries #RightToLand #Landdefenders #Criminalization #criminalizationofpeasants #peasantsstruggles #ThePhilippines