Nepal has been cited for decades as a “success story” for its efforts to protect wildlife and the natural environment. However, this has come at a high cost for forest-dependent Indigenous peoples. Among the communities most affected are the Tharu, living predominantly in the mid-western part, and the Chepang, Bote, Darai Banariya, Danuwar, and Majhi, living in the central part of the Terai lowland region in the south of the country. In this report, Amnesty International the Community Self-Reliance Centre (CSRC) unpack the failures of the Government of Nepal to uphold the rights of these Indigenous peoples, focusing on Chitwan National Park (CNP) and Bardiya National Park (BNP), the two largest national parks in the Terai region. Amnesty and the CSRC documented the following human rights violations against Indigenous peoples: forced evictions; denial of rights to their ancestral lands; unjustified restrictions on access to the forests and natural resources on which they traditionally rely, amounting to a denial of access to food; arbitrary arrests, unlawful killings, detention and torture or other ill-treatment by the Nepal Army and National Park personnel protecting conservation areas, and the state’s failure to provide effective remedies to the Indigenous peoples for the many rights violations against them.
