Anne Kajir

Anne Kajir won a precedent-setting lawsuit on landholder rights against a global timber company that conducted large-scale, illegal logging in the largest remaining intact block of tropical forests in Papua New Guinea.

Attorney Anne Kajir uncovered evidence that widespread corruption and complicity in the Papua New Guinea government had allowed rampant, illegal logging, which was destroying the largest remaining intact block of tropical forest in the Asia Pacific region.

In 1997, her first year of practice, Kajir successfully defended a precedent-setting appeal in the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea, which forced the logging industry to pay damages to indigenous landowners. Kajir has served as chief executive officer of the Environmental Law Centre in Port Moresby and was the lead attorney in a Supreme Court case aimed at stopping foreign timber companies’ large-scale, illegal deforestation practices, often accompanied by threats of harm to local landholders who dare to challenge them.

Timber has historically been a corrupting force in the politics of Papua New Guinea, which has a government with longstanding, lucrative relationships with timber interests. Although the country’s constitution guarantees the land rights of traditional communities living in the forest, the reality is far different. Kajir found evidence of widespread government corruption that allowed logging companies to act with impunity, ignoring the terms of the government-issued timber permits, and terrorizing the local communities—at gunpoint in some cases—into signing over their land rights.