UN Observers Monitoring Abuses Against Standing Rock Water Protectors

The increasingly violent attacks by North Dakota police and private security forces against peaceful, Indigenous water protectors have caught the nation's attention as well as that of the United Nations, an arm of which has begun an investigation into the protesters' claims of human rights abuses, including "excessive force, unlawful arrests, and mistreatment in jail," the Guardianreported late Monday.

Observers have begun collecting testimonies from those protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline and, on Monday, Grand Chief Edward John, a Native American member of the U.N. permanent forum on Indigenous issues, met with police officials in Mandan, North Dakota and visited the cages where some of the 141 arrested protesters were held after last week's military-style police raid.

Those detained at the Morton County Correctional Center said that while they were held in the 10-by-14-foot cages they were forced to wait for basic necessities, such as "access to bathrooms, food, water, and medical attention," the Guardian reported.

"We embarked upon a peaceful and prayerful campaign," Standing Rock Sioux member Phyllis Young told the U.N. representatives. "They were placed in cages. They had numbers written on their arms very much like concentration camps." Young said that the police's treatment of native people was "not only conditions of colonialism, but conditions of war."

"The government is allowing the police force to be used as a military force to protect an oil company," added protester Kandi Mossett, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nation.

The Morton County Sheriff's office has also been accused of tracking the activists through a feature on Facebook, a claim which spurred more than one million people worldwide to "check in" to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation on Monday in an attempt to "overwhelm and confuse" law enforcement and express solidarity with the demonstrators.

The fact that a campaign of "intimidation and repression" is being waged on behalf of a private company is not to be overlooked, according to a coalition of environmental groups, which late last week sent a letter (pdf) to the owners of the $3.7 billion tar sands pipeline, reminding them of their "complicity" in the ongoing human rights abuses.

"As joint owners of the Dakota Access Pipeline, you have a corporate duty under international law and the laws of the United States to respect human rights and to avoid complicity in further human rights abuses. It is imperative that you take action to stop the attacks on peaceful occupiers immediately," states the letter, which is addressed to officials with Energy Transfer Partners, Phillips 66, Enbridge Energy Partners, and Wells Fargo bank.

The violent raid and mass arrest last week "has created a situation of urgency in which the companies must take immediate responsibility for the human rights impacts of their actions, including the companies' complicity in the actions of others," the letter continues:

As a matter of international law, your companies have an affirmative responsibility to protect human rights, including the responsibility to: avoid causing or contributing to adverse human rights impacts to peaceful protestors through your companies' own activities; and to seek to prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts that are directly linked to your companies' operations. These responsibilities also apply to banks and other institutions that provide financing for a project that will cause such adverse human rights impacts.

"We emphasize and caution that the active involvement by persons acting under color of governmental authority, including state or local law enforcement, does not absolve your companies of these duties," it further states.

The signatories, who are leaders with the Center for International Environmental Law, Honor the Earth, Bold Alliance, Climate Justice Programme, EarthRights International, Oil Change International, and Greenpeace USA, note that they "have spent decades advocating and litigating on behalf of Indigenous communities outside the United States," whose rights are too often "violated by proponents of extractive industries around the world...And we are alarmed that these all-too-familiar patterns are playing out in the United States at Standing Rock."

Similarly, Roberto Borrero, a Taino tribe member and representative of the International Indian Treaty Council, who is assisting the U.N. in collecting the testimonies, told the Guardian, "When you look at what the international standards are for the treatment of people, and you are in a place like the United States, it's really astounding to hear some of this testimony."

International human rights watchdog Amnesty International has also sent a delegation of human rights observers to monitor the police response to the ongoing protests. Meanwhile, the water protectors have vowed to maintain their vigil throughout the winter and continue their resistance as the pipeline construction encroaches upon their sacred land and water.