Hugo Jabini
Hugo Jabini is a Saramaka politician and environmental leader from Suriname. In 1998 he became the spokesman of the Association of Saamaka Authorities (Dutch acronym VSG). In 2007 he and Wanze Eduards were part of the VSG team that won an landrights lawsuit against the Surinamese government in international court. For their work in the landrights struggle they shared the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2009. From 2010 to 2015 Jabini was a member of the Surinamese National Assembly, as part of the National Democratic Party (NDP). Biography. Jabini is from village of Tutubuka in the district Boven Suriname . Both his mother and his grandfather were captains. In 2010 he graduated from the Anton de Kom University after a comparative law study comparing Surinamese and Saamaka land rights protections. In 1998 Jabini became spokesman of the Association of Saamaka Authorities (Dutch acronym VSG), an organization in which 61 Saamaka villages worked together in the struggle for Indigenous land rights. These rights were being threatened by industrial mining and logging. On November 28, 2007, Jabini and Wanze Eduards, also of the VSG, won a lawsuit against the state of Suriname that they had filed of behalf of the Saramaka people  at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. For their work on the land rights struggle the two men were jointly awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2009. In 2010 Jabini was elected member of the Surinamese National Assembly as part of the NDP slate of candidates. He was also chosen from among fifteen candidates as a member of Parliamentarians for Global Action. In 2015 Jabini was not included on the NDP's candidate list for the general election. He was not given a reason for this change. Earlier, during the budget development process he had offered the critique that  the landrights matters had still not been resolved, and that the government was still giving out natural resource extraction concessions in Saamaka territory.