Rivers & Rights Foundation

To collaborate with river dependent communities and their allies across Southeast Asia and beyond to assert rights to dignified livelihoods and healthy river ecosystems, create the pressure needed for accountability for violations of community and environmental rights and collectively mobilize to overcome oppression and injustice.

Rivers & Rights raises human rights–related concerns about financing by public development banks—such as the ADB, World Bank, and Thai banks—linked to hydropower, regional energy connectivity, and mining. It also examines reprisals against human rights defenders who bring project-related concerns to international financial institutions. At the national level, the organization engages with Thai banks to raise awareness of the environmental and human rights impacts of dam financing, aiming to dispel the myth of hydropower as a “clean,” “green,” and low-cost energy source. Across the region, Rivers & Rights denounces the human rights violations and environmentally devastating impacts associated with mining for rare earths and critical minerals, particularly given that much of this extraction is intended to support the expansion of the military-industrial complex.