Irish Centre for Human Rights Blog

Jennifer Hough is a social justice & human rights advocate who seeks to address injustice using strategic law, policy and communications to bring about change. 

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Late last year, Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne, delivered powerful testimony on the world stage about the catastrophic climate consequences facing small island states. Evoking the existential threat to his nation, he lamented that sea level rise is “swallowing land that is vital to our country.” This is not just a legal question, “it is a matter of survival,” he said.

Mr Browne’s narrative was compelling and indeed, the government of Antigua and Barbuda has been at the forefront of making the case for small island states around the world regarding the threat of climate change to their existence – caused, as they point out, not by them but by the big polluters. That Mr Browne and his government have been instrumental in this international campaign makes his domestic policies all the more frustrating and inexplicable as back home, Antigua’s government is facilitating a textbook case of disaster capitalism on its very own island, Barbuda.

A phrase coined by Naomi Klein in her book Shock Doctrine, disaster capitalism is the co-opting and restructuring of a landscape to benefit governments and/or corporations who exploit crises and disasters while communities are at their most vulnerable. Or as Klein says, “the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities”, to reap profits and deepen inequality while the affected population is still in shock. One only has to look at recent proclamations by U.S. President Donald Trump regarding Gaza to understand at its most base level what disaster capitalism is – an elite mindset that anywhere can be bought, regardless of the context.

In the case of Barbuda, in 2017, Hurricane Irma destroyed 90% of the buildings on the miniscule island of 160 square kilometres and saw some 1,800 residents forcibly evacuated to Antigua. What happened next was right out of the shock doctrine playbook: The absence of the local community was seen as an opportunity by the government in Antigua to do what it had long wanted to – and what Barbudans had resisted for years – reimagine the island as a retreat for the rich and famous. Ironically, the island’s unique selling point is that it is one of the Caribbean’s last unspoilt islands. It has remained so because Barbudans have fought as a collective to keep it that way.

Land rights

To understand just how egregious the situation is, one must understand the politics of the island of Barbuda. 

Barbuda is governed from Antigua, and there have been long standing issues over Barbudan autonomy, its land rights, and the Antiguan government’s desire to drive tourism and privatise large tracts of the island. The tiny island, because of its land rights, is an outlier in the story of the Caribbean, and an alternative to mass tourism development. Its residents engage in low impact tourism and in practices such as fishing, farming and hunting, essentially, refusing to rely on tourism as most of the other islands do.

The unique land rights stem from the fact that Barbuda was settled in the 1700s by enslaved African people, sent from Antigua by a wealthy British sugar plantation owner. Since emancipation, Barbudans have collectively governed the use of land – including ‘lucrative’ beach-front tracts of land. Barbudans land rights were enshrined in law by the Barbuda Land Act 2007, which stated that land was held “in common” and could not be sold, effectively limiting private development.

When Hurricane Irma hit, with residents dispersed throughout the governing island, the Antiguan government began changing coveted land ownership laws to allow for a carving up of the island. The Barbuda Land (Amendment) Act 2017 paved the way for the government to sell leases to foreign developers and the following year the government completely repealed the Barbuda Land Act, 2007. Prime Minister Gaston cast local people and their land rights as ‘barriers to recovery’ and as Barbudans grappled with how to get back to their island to rebuild their homes and livelihoods, the central government began clearing land for a new airport with a private jet terminal, overriding the authority of the local Barbuda Council. A full report and a timeline of the airport case can be found here.

Essential services had not been restored, yet the government was preparing – not for locals to return – but for visitors to the island’s future luxury resorts. This marked the beginning of a new era of intensive action on Barbuda, sparking global media attention, and a myriad of legal cases with support from global lawyers and activists that continue to this day.

Resistance

There are too many acts of resistance to fully consider in this blog, and more context is available here; however, one of the battles has all the ingredients of a Hollywood blockbuster. It involves an abandoned ‘ghost’ K-Club resort, where the people’s princess, Diana, once holidayed, and an A-list celebrity claiming to resurrect it for the greater good. The celebrity in question, Robert de Niro, would likely be aghast at any comparison with Donald Trump, but the tactics being used in his name in Barbuda are the very same methods of disaster capitalism that Trump champions. These includes a land grab masquerading as assistance and white saviourism underwritten by some of the most wealthy and powerful people on the planet.

In 2014, De Niro and billionaire businessman James Packer acquired a 251-acre lease on the land of the abandoned K-Club to develop ‘Paradise Found,’ a luxury resort for the super-rich that included the pink sand Princess Diana Beach, named for her visit there in 1997 four months before her death.

There was a stumbling block to their plans, however: the Barbuda Land Act. To overcome this, in 2016 the Antigua government passed the ‘Paradise Found Act,’ giving De Niro’s project special privileges, including the ability to bypass local land rights protections. Locals have sought to challenge the legal changes taking place at a rapid pace with little or no consultation.

Today, De Niro’s venture has been renamed the Nobu Beach Inn, with its very own high-end restaurant, Nobu Barbuda, already open for business. With a lunch costing around $50 USD a plate, it’s hardly for locals. According to reports, De Niro can be found there with various family members, discussing plans for the new hotel, which will have 36 rooms in 17 guest bungalows and 25 private beachfront villas priced at $12 million USD or more apiece.

While local opposition to the whole scale takeover of the island goes on in various courts, De Niro markets his version of events in places such as the New York Times travel section, inviting hand-picked journalists to interview him beachside. In his telling, he is a saviour of the island and the resort is ‘eco’ friendly, in keeping with the natural landscape and using building codes to withstand future Irma type events.

But there are many questions as to what ‘eco’ really means in this context, and what will happen if weather extremes, as predicted, make life even more precarious on Barbuda. The super rich will have long taken refuge elsewhere if sea level rises make life unsustainable on islands like Barbuda. Meanwhile, those building high end resorts are cast as environmentalists, when in fact they are elites with high carbon footprints, remaking a safe and pleasant world for themselves, and displacing low-carbon footprint locals in the name of sustainability.

What De Niro and others fail to understand is that their so-called eco resorts are a form of colonisation 2.0, commodifying the landscape that Barbudans have fished, farmed, and cared for over the generations. This is green gentrification: the grabbing of pristine landscapes for the pleasure of the elite, simply because they can.

Construction as destruction

Hurricane Irma made it possible to frame development of Barbuda as a humanitarian effort to rebuild and improve, with post-hurricane Barbuda being treated like a “blighted urban neighborhood in need of renewal, where Barbudans are cast as welfare dependents awaiting external developers’ plans for reconstruction.”

The truth is much more complex and dark. Construction of large developments on Barbuda involves replacing natural coastal and wetland ecosystems with luxury residences and golf courses, disrupting fragile ecosystems, and leaving the land more vulnerable to climate change. In addition, most of the coastline is accessed by small scale fishers and the right to access their own coastline is now also under threat as resorts privatise access to the seashore and put traditional fishing and farming livelihoods in jeopardy.

The Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) has been working with Barbudans since 2018, and is using strategic litigation to fight against the environmental and cultural destruction of their island by what they call non-sustainable, harmful developments. GLAN represents people like local Barbudan fisherman and tour guide, George Jeffery. A tour guide to the frigate bird sanctuary, Jeffery lives a quiet life in harmony with the birds on which he relies for his income. While his livelihood is at risk, what worries him most is the significant risks to the delicate ecosystem that is a critical habitat for his beloved frigate bird.

GLAN has also filed a complaint to the RAMSAR secretariat, as the Codrington Lagoon National Park, which is a Ramsar Convention protected wetland, is under threat from large-scale construction activities. As a signatory of the Ramsar Convention, the Government of Antigua and Barbuda has a series of obligations vis-à-vis the site, of which several have been breached in the case of the Codrington Lagoon, according to the complaint.

To add insult to injury, locals are slowly but surely being locked out of large areas of the island, places they have always had access to through their customary land tenure system. There are also reports of an armed police presence on the island overseeing land clearing, a worrying escalation and a signal that the land grab will continue.

Climate justice denied

While Barbudans’ cases wend their way through various legal systems and complaints mechanisms, developments continue, eroding not just a precarious coastline and ecosystems, but a way of life. The acts of exploitation people face are “no longer on plantations but are now seen in the lucrative tourism industry which has significant social and environmental consequences.”

There is hope that the forthcoming ICJ advisory opinion will offer a path towards climate justice for small island nations facing the worst impacts of climate change, but it remains to be seen how this will be a positive for Barbuda. As highlighted at the outset, the government of Antigua and Barbuda is at the forefront of campaigning for climate justice, yet it fails to recognise how the destruction of indigenous land rights and vulnerable communities and ecosystems fits into this picture. This begs questions, such as: Who is climate justice for? How can the government of Antigua and Barbuda push for global climate action while enabling land grabs and environmental destruction at home? Can such a government truly claim to champion climate justice, or is it only for certain sectors of society?

What is certain against such questions is that Barbudans will not stop fighting for their land and their rights.