Judith Kimerling News Today

Three decades on, she is representing a teenage girl before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In what might have been a case study for her law students back in New York, the court will soon rule on the rights of “uncontacted” peoples for the first time.

After her start as a young lawyer working on the Love Canal case, Kimerling refused to take part in class-action litigation that consumed decades and victimized Ecuador’s Indigenous peoples. Now, her day in court has finally come on one group’s behalf.

Amongst the barrage of near-constant lousy news on the climate, from record rain bombs and flooding to relentless heat domes and wildfires, comes historic great news.

In the case Tagaeri & Taromenane Indigenous people vs the Ecuadorian state, lawyers representing the communities in voluntary isolation say the Ecuadorian state has failed to protect these populations and propelled the extractive industry in the area, putting pressure on the rainforest and increasing conflict between local communities.

Deep in Ecuador’s northern Amazon rainforest live the Tagaeri and Taromenane Indigenous nations, the last two communities in the country who have never set foot outside of the jungle. They have long resisted all outsiders’ contact and continue fiercely defending their remaining territory. But over the years, three massacres in 2003, 2006 and 2013, have […]