Attachments
Human Rights Council
Fifty-sixth session
18 June–12 July 2024
Agenda item 3
Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development
Summary
The Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Olivier De Schutter, conducted an official country visit to Ecuador from 28 August to 8 September 2023. The purpose of the visit was to examine the efforts made by Ecuador to combat poverty and to protect the human rights of people living in poverty. Ecuador faces a vicious cycle of poverty and insecurity. Poverty results in insecurity and insecurity, in turn, impacts the ability of the country to fight poverty. The incidence of poverty is higher among women, the Indigenous population and people who live in rural areas. The report closes with a set of recommendations focused on improving the situation of Indigenous groups and women, making social protection more effective and taxation more progressive and better protecting workers’ rights.
Annex
Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Olivier De Schutter, on his visit to Ecuador
I. Introduction
1. The Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Olivier De Schutter, conducted an official country visit to Ecuador from 28 August to 8 September 2023. He is grateful to the Government for its cooperation prior to, during and following up on the visit.
2. During his visit, the Special Rapporteur met with the President, Guillermo Lasso, his Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Education, and Economic and Social Inclusion and the Technical Secretary of the “Ecuador grows without child malnutrition” strategy. He also met with the Deputy Ministers of Economy and Finance, Public Health, Urban Development and Housing, Rural Lands and Ancestral Territories, Social Inclusion, Water, Sanitation, Irrigation and Drainage, and Labour and Employment. He met representatives from various ministries, including the Ministries of Women and Human Rights, Economy and Finance, Agriculture and Livestock, Education, Public Health, Labour, Environment, Water and Ecological Transition, Urban Development and Housing, Economic and Social Inclusion, and Foreign Affairs. In addition, he met with representatives of the National Councils for the Equality of Peoples and Nationalities, for the Equality of Persons with Disabilities, for Gender Equality, for Intergenerational Equality and on Equality in Human Mobility. He engaged in dialogue with the Secretariat of Bilingual Intercultural Education and Ethno-Education, the National Secretariats of Planning, Management and Development of Peoples and Nationalities, the National Statistics and Census Institute and the National Social Security Institute. The Special Rapporteur also met with representatives of the Ombudsperson’s Office, the Prefect of Pastaza province, the Mayor of the city of Puyo and representatives from the municipality of Quito.
3. The Special Rapporteur travelled to Quito, to the Chota, La Concepción and Salinas ancestral territory, Puyo and Riobamba. He met with the Afro-Ecuadorian communities of El Rosal, Estacion Carchi, La Concepción and Salinas, and with both female and male representatives of the following Indigenous nationalities: Achuar, Andwa, Kichwa, Sapara, Shiwiar, Shuar and Waorani of the Amazon region. He also visited and met with Indigenous communities in Pull Grande and Comité de Desarrollo Galte in Guamote canton and Compañía Labranza in Colta canton. He talked with many members of civil society organizations, activists and human rights defenders, including environmental rights defenders in all the places he visited, as well as members of the National Coalition of Women of Ecuador. The Special Rapporteur also took part in meetings with representatives of academia and think tanks.
4. The Special Rapporteur is thankful for the support he received from the United Nations Resident Coordinator Office, the United Nations country team and particularly the Regional Office for South America of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. He expresses his gratitude to all the individuals, communities and groups he met and who graciously shared their lived experiences with him.
II. Context
5. The visit took place a week after the presidential and parliamentary elections held on 20 August 2023, following the dissolution of the National Assembly on 17 May. The second round of the presidential election took place on 15 October, when Daniel Noboa was elected President of Ecuador from 2023 to 2025, to serve out the term begun by Guillermo Lasso.
6. Both the electoral debate and the media reporting at the time of the visit focused largely on the growing insecurity in the country, dramatically illustrated by the assassination of one of the presidential candidates, Fernando Villavicencio, on 9 August 2023. The homicide rate in Ecuador quadrupled between 2018 and 2022, reaching almost 26 homicides per 100,000 individuals in 2022.1 By the end of 2023, it had risen to almost 45 homicides per 100,000, potentially making Ecuador the most violent country in Latin America. 2 Ecuadorians have witnessed a worrying recrudescence of crime related to drug trafficking. Extortion and kidnapping have increased by up to 300 per cent compared to 2022, according to the Office of the Attorney General.
7. A vicious cycle has emerged. Poverty results in insecurity and the lack of job opportunities makes young people an easy target for criminal gangs as crime, including the smuggling of goods across borders, becomes a desirable option for many. Insecurity, in turn, impacts the ability of the country to fight poverty. Businesses are subjected to extortion in the form of vacunas (protection money), schools are so unsafe that some parents pull their children out, and both insecurity and poor economic prospects favour emigration, particularly to the United States of America. While Ecuador is one of the Latin American and Caribbean States with the largest number of people with refugee status (hosting 76,265 officially recognized refugees in 2023),3 between 2021 and 2022, approximately 200,000 Ecuadorians left the country – a significant increase from previous years.4 People planning to emigrate now use land routes which, albeit dangerous and long, are cheaper than the alternatives, thus attracting a larger number of people.
8. This vicious circle of poverty and insecurity can only be broken by investing in people and providing young people with better prospects by guaranteeing their right to education, health and social protection. Some significant progress has been achieved in recent years. In particular, the minimum wage was increased by 6 per cent in 2023 and the Government committed to continue increasing it over the next decade. An additional $1.2 billion was invested in social protection, and social protection coverage was significantly increased by extending the scope of the campesino social security scheme, the scheme for unpaid workers in the home and the voluntary insurance scheme. Perhaps most remarkably, chronic child malnutrition fell by 4 per cent in 2023.5
9. The Special Rapporteur’s visit provided an opportunity to identify areas where more progress could be made, including regaining young people’s trust. Part of the challenge will be to identify sources of funding. The two referendums also held on 20 August 2023, on oil exploitation in the 43-ITT oil block, located inside Yasuní National Park, and on whether metallic mining should be prohibited in the Chocó Andino in Pichincha province, respectively, gave the Government a clear mandate to move beyond extractivism. Of the more than 10 million voters, 58.95 per cent voted in favour of banning oil exploitation in Yasuní National Park and 68 per cent of the voters residing in the municipalities involved voted to ban metallic mining in the Chocó Andino.
10. One immediate consequence of these referendums was that credit rating agencies such as Fitch, Moody’s and S&P downgraded the long-term foreign currency issuer default rating from B- to CCC+. The broader lesson, however, is that a new development model, less reliant on natural resource exploitation, should be designed. Indeed, the Special Rapporteur met a large number of individuals and groups who expressed their concerns about the impacts of the extractive industry throughout the country. In Chimborazo and Pastaza provinces, Indigenous communities explained that mining projects were polluting the soils and water sources on which they depend for agricultural production. Other groups presented him with examples of mining projects, both legal and illegal, that affected their access to resources. Two of the most publicized examples are the large-scale Fruta del Norte gold mine and the open-pit Mirador mine for copper and gold extraction, located in the southeast and the south of Zamora-Chinchipe province, respectively, threatening the livelihoods of members of the Shuar nationality. Several other mining projects raise similar concerns, such as concessions in the cantons of Pangua and Sigchos in Cotopaxi province, in La Merced de Buenos Aires parish in Imbabura province, in the canton of Las Naves in Bolívar province and in Las Pampas and Palo Quemado parishes in the canton of Sigchos. While the Special Rapporteur cannot comprehensively cover the details of each of these cases in the present report, he was alarmed by allegations that the consultation requirements established in article 398 of the Constitution and the 2009 mining law were routinely circumvented, and that projects were allowed to go ahead despite the strong opposition of the local communities.