The Borneo Project's Legal Aid Fund enables indigenous communities of Sarawak to file lawsuits to protect their native customary lands, including forests, farms and rivers.

Over the past thirty years, Borneo communities dependent on forests, subsistence agriculture, and small scale agroforestry for commercial crops have protested the takeover of their lands for logging and commercial plantations -- most recently for oil palm and fast growing timber.  Indigenous communities have protested the theft and degradation of their land and resources through petitions, demonstrations, blockades, political organizing and community mapping.  Now they have turned to the courts, with some 200 lawsuits in Sarawak alone defending customary land and resource rights.

Under Malaysian law, and especially under Sarawak state land law, native communities have the right to decide how lands are used in their customary territories. But state agencies collusive with industry insist on the government's "right" to develop land for the "benefit of all". But the financial benefits of developing much of the land expropriated from community control accrue to just a few tycoons, politicians, and their families.

Inspired by several successful lawsuits to gain legal recognition of customary land and resource rights, over 100 communities are involved in pending lawsuits.  Many others would like to file land rights claims, but cannot afford costs of initial filing fees, or high costs of preparing effective evidence to support their claims at trial.  (This includes mapping land and resources under customary uses and management, as well as affadavits documenting oral histories of land uses and claims.)

Donations to the Borneo Project will be channelled to offset communities' legal filing fees, as well as to help them prepare effective evidence to support their cases.  In 2009.  Sarawak NGOs, local activists, and customary rights lawyers will choose lawsuits that need financial assistance for communities to pursue their claims in state and federal courts.

Initial filing fees are US$ 1500 per case. Communities incur additional costs to prepare maps and affadavits.  In 2009 we hope to assist at least 10 communities pursue lawsuits.  Make a difference by donating today!

 More Context:

Over seven million hectares of Borneo's forests and farmlands, sustainably managed for centuries by indigenous communities, are now threatened by predatory logging, and the expansion of industrial oil palm and timber plantations, as well as new hydroelectric dams.

These plantations are not forests They are monoculture agribusiness, dependent on burning or herbicides to destroy biological diversity as the plantations are established. Bulldozing hillsides and peatlands compacts soils and causes massive soil erosion, silting waterways and destroying freshwater ecosystems, dumping silt on coastal coral reefs, and releasing massive carbon loadings to the atmosphere.