Tegucigalpa, May 19 (teleSUR-RHC)-- The international human rights organization FIAN on Monday slammed the U.N. Universal Periodic Review process on Honduras for its failure to address key issues of land access and the right to food in its 152 human rights recommendations to the Honduran government.

While FIAN accepts the UPR's recommendations and applauds the inclusion of critical topics such as impunity and women's rights, it said the exclusion of various issues related to the right to food is a major concern given the acute situation of poverty and repression in Honduras' rural areas.
Honduras' Bajo Aguan region, where over 120 farmers have been killed since 2010 in ongoing land conflicts with regional large landowners, was offered as case in point for the urgency of including land and food issues on Honduras' human rights agenda.

“On land issues, as illustrated by the Bajo Aguán's case, the Honduran government still responds with the militarization of conflicting areas, the implementation of arbitrary and violent evictions, and the criminalization of peasant leaders and human rights defenders,” Executive Director of FIAN Honduras Ana María Pineda Medina said in a statement.

According to Honduras' UPR Platform of civil society organizations, the Honduran state's self-assessment of the country's human rights progress vis-a-vis the 2011 UPR recommendations “lacked coherence and expression of an authentic commitment with human rights.”

While government officials reported Honduras complied with 82 percent of the 2011 UPR recommendations, human rights defenders criticized the government's portrayal of the country's human rights situation as “far from the reality on the ground,” according to FIAN.