PBI-Canada plans April and May webinars, looks ahead to a COP30 webinar with environmental defenders in November

Published by Brent Patterson on March 26, 2025March 26, 2025

Photo: On February 24, we held our first webinar of the year focused on the situation of human rights defenders in the Colombian port city of Buenaventura.

This year PBI-Canada has a schedule of confirmed and planned webinars that we hope you will find of interest, that will provide important context, and that will ultimately assist the protection needs of human rights defenders.

Immediately on the horizon:

Tuesday April 8: The militarization of Indigenous territories, borders and foreign policy has already put the lives of land defenders, migrants and communities around the world at risk. Join this webinar to hear a panel of authors and activists share critical perspectives on why more militarism is not the answer.

Sunday May 4: As 50+ international delegations and 280+ exhibitors prepare for the CANSEC arms show in Ottawa in late-May, we gather frontline defenders and allies to provide testimony on how “military goods” are used to repress human rights defenders in Honduras, Indonesia, Palestine and the Philippines.

We will be sharing registration links for these two webinars soon.

Our plans for the coming months

June: Peace Brigades International needs volunteers to accompany frontline defenders in Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico. This webinar will feature past volunteers and an accompanied defender to highlight this work and to encourage applications to volunteer with PBI teams in Latin America.

June: We will hear from frontline environmental defenders in the Amazonian region of Putumayo in Colombia whose lives are at-risk due to illegal armed actors/paramilitary groups and for their opposition to the environmental destruction that comes with the extraction of minerals and oil by transnational companies.

June or September: The United Nations Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations will be presenting a thematic report to the Human Rights Council on the use of artificial intelligence and the UN Guiding Principles. We will look at the new threats posed to defenders by AI.

September: This coming September 6 marks the 30^th anniversary of the death of Dudley George, an Indigenous land defender killed by an Ontario Provincial Police sniper during a re-occupation of Ipperwash provincial park. PBI visited the area four times in 1995/96. We look back at that time and assess the safety of defenders today.

Tuesday November 18: During the United Nations COP30 climate summit in Brazil, we will bring together a UN Special Rapporteur and environmental defenders to talk about the risks and protection needs of those on the frontlines challenging the extractive industries that are accelerating the climate crisis.

Our commitment

Our commitment is to amplify the voices of human rights defenders, provide context to understand their struggles, and to document in short articles the physical accompaniments provided by PBI teams around the world.

Those articles, uploaded on an almost daily basis, can be read here. Apart from subscribing to our e-newsletter here, you can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, X and now Bluesky.

If you would like to help support this work, you can make an online donation through the CanadaHelps.org platform here.

The work of Peace Brigades International-Canada is carried out by one staff-person and the exceptional contributions of eleven volunteer Board members.

PBI-Canada coordinator Brent Patterson.