Introduction
On June 14, 2025, President Daniel Noboa submitted his third urgent economic bill proposal, entitled “Law for the Recovery of Protected Areas and the Promotion of Local Development,” to the National Assembly. This proposal will be reviewed by the National Assembly’s Commission for Economic, Productive, and Microenterprise Development and will be put to a vote within a period of no more than 30 days.
In the proposed law, Noboa seeks to hand over the administration of protected areas to private and/or foreign companies with regard to the following activities: tourism, security, environmental protection, provision of environmental services, scientific research, facilitating the enjoyment of natural heritage, and any other activity to be determined by President Daniel Noboa through regulations.1 This proposal ignores the existence of collective subjects — ancestral and native peoples — living in the territories, where the designation of “protected areas” has been unilaterally imposed without consultation. This is a clear and direct violation of the collective rights recognized by the Constitution and by international instruments on human rights and indigenous peoples. These rights include the right to self-determination, to maintaining possession of their territories, to free, prior and informed consultation and consent, to limits on military activities in indigenous territories, among others. The proposal does not address any of the factors that it cites as alleged causes of a lack of sufficient protection of said areas.
In Ecuador, dozens of communities, peoples, and Indigenous Nations have historically seen their most essential rights violated, including the denial of recognition of their property, based on a colonial and landowner logic. This has occurred through the declaration of protected areas, which are then given priority over the life and the centuries-old, and even millennia-old, existence of ancestral peoples in these territories.
The reality of these territories is reflected in the following data. The data offer details about the Indigenous, Afro-Ecuadorian and Montubio communities, Peoples, and Nations whose territories overlap with the national system of protected areas, and who would be affected by this proposed law:
Based on the information on the map, at least 10 Indigenous, Afro-Ecuadorian, and Montubio Nations are affected by protected areas, impacting more than two million hectares. They will be directly threatened by Noboa’s proposed law that seeks to privatize their territories:
The proposed text makes no mention whatsoever of the presence of Indigenous Peoples and Nations. Nor does it mention their collective rights. It merely states that the State owns these “lands” and may use them freely for economic purposes. This proposal continues and deepens a dark and painful historical reality in Ecuador—one that denies the existence and rights of Indigenous Peoples, Afro-Ecuadorian, and Montubio communities within a system upheld by colonialist and racist policies that ignore and trample on the struggles and historic gains of the Indigenous movement in defense of their rights and territories.
This bill is being touted as an effective solution to establishing innovative measures and mechanisms for the protection, economic recovery, and sustainability of protected areas. However, just as he did with the so-called Solidarity Law, Noboa is once again — under the pretext of economics — using a legislative process established exclusively for economic matters to evade a democratic debate that should take place. The only truly economic measure is the offer to hand over these areas to private actors, which, as we have already stated, will result in a violation of the collective rights of Indigenous Peoples and Nations.
Below, we briefly detail how the proposed law primarily and directly affects indigenous Peoples by undermining the right to consultation and consent, the right to self-governance, and the right to self-determination:
The Right to Consultation and the Right to Prior, Free, and Informed consent
The Ecuadorian Constitution and international human rights treaties and instruments obligate the State to consult with Indigenous Peoples prior to adopting any legislative or administrative measure that may affect their collective rights.2 However, this bill ignores the historical existence of communities and Indigenous Peoples whose territories are located within the National System of Protected Areas. The bill attempts to disguise itself as an economic law, with the objective of avoiding any consultation with Indigenous Peoples, despite the fact that it undeniably affects them directly. Therefore, for this law to be approved, it necessarily requires the consultation and prior, free, and informed consent of the communities, Peoples, and Indigenous Nations whose territories are overlapped by protected areas; failure to do so would constitute a serious and flagrant violation of this right.3
According to the text of this bill, the State intends to negotiate directly with private companies over protected areas, and therefore over indigenous territories. The State seeks to define the activities that will be carried out in these territories without ever considering the participation of their ancestral owners. The bill, if passed into law, will increase the restrictions, limitations, and violations of communities’ rights to governance, territorial management, and mandatory consultation, in addition to measures currently imposed by the State on these territories.
Likewise, the bill’s explicit reference to the presence of armed security forces as guarantors of protected areas — and also, therefore, of indigenous ancestral territories — is worrying. Such intrusion would expressly violate Article 57.20 of the Ecuadorian Constitution, as well as the mandatory criteria established by the Constitutional Court regarding the obligation to obtain the consent of Indigenous Peoples when military activities are intended to be carried out in their territories.4 This obligation is also included in international instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.5
The imposition of such activities and the presence of external actors, without a culturally appropriate process of consultation or prior, free, and informed consent, would break up community cohesion and knowledge, generating disharmony as well as material and spiritual impacts.
The Right to Governance and the Right to Self-determination
The formalization of indigenous ancestral property through a title constitutes a constitutionally and internationally recognized and enforceable collective right.6 This right also applies to territories that overlap with protected areas, as an essential way of providing legal security to communities and Indigenous Peoples over their territories, and of guaranteeing their survival and cultural identity. However, even though there are nearly 2 million hectares of Indigenous territories within protected areas, the Ecuadorian state has not formally recognized Indigenous ancestral property. At the national level, only 42,360 hectares of the Cuyabeno Reserve have been recognized as belonging to the Siekopai Nation, through a court ruling that was obtained after years of struggle and resistance, and which has not yet been fulfilled by the State.
The bill analyzed here threatens to further complicate the situation. The bill’s objective is to allow private actors to take over the management and administration of protected areas. That objective is in direct contradiction to the collective rights of Indigenous Peoples to exercise authority in their territories, to develop their own forms of coexistence and their own rights, and to promote their own biodiversity management practices.
Conclusions
- The bill defines protected areas as a strategic asset and a natural resource that the State may freely dispose of. The bill thus renders invisible, and denies the existence of, the Indigenous Peoples who inhabit the territories on which protected areas have been arbitrarily imposed without consultation, ignoring their authority and their rights to the territory. Furthermore, the bill makes no mention of the rights of nature.
- The lack of mention of Indigenous Peoples obscures the state’s interest in continuing to impose restrictions and limitations on their rights over territories, ignoring their authority, their own forms of governance, and their management — and thus their essential right to self-determination — as established by international law. This constitutes a serious violation of the collective rights of Indigenous Peoples.
- The Ecuadorian State has obligations as established in international instruments, the Constitution, the Law on Rural Lands and Ancestral Territories, and the Environmental Code. Despite these obligations, when the State the state unilaterally declares an area to be a protected area, the State continues to deny Indigenous Peoples any recognition of ownership and, consequently, any legal security over their ancestral territories, which are essential to their life and cultural identity. The executive branch is moving rapidly to promote laws and regulations that seek to further limit the exercise of governance and self-determination over Indigenous territories.
- The bill ignores the governance and decision-making bodies of indigenous peoples.
- The bill does not clearly establish the types of contracts that will be used between the State and private companies within protected areas. Instead, the bill leaves it up to President Noboa to determine this through regulations, which gives him free rein to create any type of contract template to privatize the territories.
Therefore:
- We demand that the National Assembly reject the proposal of the President of the Republic as unconstitutional, ineffective, and dangerous.
- We demand that the Constitutional Court, in exercising its mandate, act preventively against the serious violations of human and collective rights that arise from the failure of sub-constitutional regulations to comply with the principles and provisions of the Constitution.
- We alert international and multilateral bodies, agencies, and organizations for the protection and defense of rights with regard to the President’s repeated disavowal of the most basic tenets of the rule of law.
AMAZON FRONTLINES
1 Urgent Economic Bill Proposal for “Recovery of Protected Areas and Promotion of Local Development,” pp. 7, 8, 15.
2 Article 57, paragraphs 7 and 17 of the Constitution enshrine the collective right of indigenous peoples to be consulted prior to the adoption of legislative measures that may affect their collective rights. The Constitutional Court ruling No. 20-12-IN/20 (Triangle of Cuembí Case) clarifies that “legislative measures” shall be understood to mean any normative act issued by the public authority, regardless of its nature.
3 Constitutional Court, Judgment No. 20-12-IN/20, para. 127. “(…) this Court observes that prior consultation and obtaining the consent of the respective peoples and communities was essential for the adoption of any decision by the State that could legally affect, modify, reduce, or extinguish indigenous property rights.”
4 Constitutional Court, Judgment No. 20-12-IN/20, para. 143. “(…) in accordance with the provisions of Article 30.1 of UNDRIP, when it comes to military interventions in ancestral territories, the consent of the peoples and communities is mandatory.”
5 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Art. 30.2. “States shall conduct effective consultations with the indigenous peoples concerned, through appropriate procedures and in particular through their representative institutions, prior to the use of their lands or territories for military activities.”
6 Article 57, paragraph 5 of the Constitution recognizes the right of indigenous peoples and nations to “maintain possession of ancestral lands and territories and to obtain their free allocation.”
