2021 Right Livelihood winners fight for climate and justice

Marthe Wandou

Marthe Wandou has been fighting against sexual violence and promoting women’s and children’s rights in Cameroon for decades. Founded in 1998, her nongovernmental organization, Action Locale pour un Developpement Participatif et Autogere (ALDEPA), applies a holistic approach focusing on education, abuse prevention, and providing psychosocial care as well as legal counsel. ALDEPA also seeks to effect broad societal change.

More than 50,000 girls have so far benefited from ALDEPA’s assistance. Most of them live in northern Cameroon, a region where the Boko Haram terrorist group is active.

Wandou was born in 1963 in a village in Cameroon’s far north. She witnessed firsthand the problems that plague this region. Children and girls in particular lack education and self-determination; child marriages and violence are not uncommon. Wandou, however, defied the odds and left the region to study law in the capital, Yaounde — the first girl from her village to attend university.

Over the years, ALDEPA has helped families who experienced rape, kidnapping and other forms of violence process their pain. The organization’s activism has also helped curb the practice of child marriage. Working in a society marred by gender-based violence and insecurity, Marthe Wandou today plays a leading role in advancing the well-being of Cameroon’s girls and women.

Vladimir Sliwjak

Vladimir Sliwjak is one of Russia’s most dedicated environmentalists. The 48-year-old founder of the influential nongovernmental organization Ecodefense has spent years waging grass-roots campaigns to fight pollution. His activism has drawn attention to and at times successfully halted projects involving fossil fuel extraction, nuclear power generation and the transportation of nuclear waste — no small feat considering Russia’s authoritarian leadership and its reliance on exporting oil, gas and coal. Indeed, Russia possesses some of the world’s largest fossil fuel reserves and is a major exporter.

Sliwjak launched an anti-coal campaign with Ecodefense in 2013, becoming the first Russian group to do so. Communities across Russia subsequently reached out to each other and began sharing know-how. This led to growing opposition against coal extraction across Russia. After intense campaigning by Ecodefense highlighting the dangers of nuclear power, plans to build a nuclear power plant in Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave were abandoned in 2014.

Sliwjak has continued his activism, despite growing pressure by Russian authorities in recent years. The country has seen a generation of young climate activists lend new momentum to the cause.

Freda Huson

Fifty-seven-year-old Freda Huson has made a name for herself fighting for the rights of Canada’s Indigenous peoples, who feel a deep connection to their ancestral lands and wish to protect it from industrial construction projects.

Huson is a wing-chief of the indigenous Wet’suwet’en people in Canada. She has lived on her people’s territory surrounded by the province of British Columbia since 2010. Huson founded Unist’ot’en, a protest camp and Indigenous healing center dedicated to self-determined wellness and decolonization. Together, they have opposed the construction of a gas pipeline across Indigenous land.

Last year, Canadian authorities raided a Unist’ot’en checkpoint, sparking countrywide protests. Though Huson’s activism has succeeded in slowing down the pipeline project, construction is still ongoing.

Huson is standing up for Indigenous peoples’ rights to land and for environmental protection. Yet her activism also touches on a deeper clash of cultures and lifestyles that have marked Canada for years. For centuries, Indigenous peoples have endured unspeakable violence and exploitation. This became all too apparent once more when a mass grave of Indigenous children was discovered near a Catholic boarding school in the summer of 2021.

Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment (LIFE)

The Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment (LIFE) was founded by the Indian lawyers Ritwick Dutta and Rahul Choudhary to help communities take legal action against environmental pollution. They had noticed that bringing such cases to court involved considerable legal fees and long waits. The intricate, technical nature of the complaints further complicated matters.

LIFE has been working to assist communities in launching suits against construction projects and deforestation. The organization succeeded in forcing actors to take responsibility for industrial-scale pollution that caused environmental damage and harmed peoples’ health.

It took the British mining company Vedanta to court over its plans to extract Bauxit in India’s Odisha state. India’s top court ruled that the company needed the support of regional communities to mine in the state and ordered it to abandoned the mining project in 2010. The ruling set a precedent.

LIFE also played a key role in the formation of the National Green Tribunal of India in 2010. The court specializes in environmental trials and adjudicating complicated, multidisciplinary cases.

The organization has allowed environmental and animal rights activists to call on India’s judiciary. It has empowered people in all parts of the country to stand up to powerful economic actors whose actions pose a danger to public health and the environment.

This article was translated from German.