Last Updated on July 24, 2025
In the span of six months, Nepal’s Supreme Court delivered two landmark decisions that, on paper, should rein in state power over protected landscapes and the rights of Indigenous peoples.
In January, a constitutional bench struck down a 2024 law that opened national parks and conservation areas to large infrastructure. In June, the Court went further, ordering every tier of government to ensure that future laws, policies, and programs comply with ILO Convention 169 and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), including the requirement of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC).
Yet, as the Court delays publishing the full text of its January ruling, the federal government has continued to push big-ticket projects through some of the country’s most sensitive ecosystems.
On June 5, 2025, the Investment Board Nepal (IBN), chaired by Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli, approved a 57.6 billion rupee (≈US\$416 million), 81-kilometer Muktinath cable car that would cut across the Annapurna Conservation Area under a build-own-operate-transfer model.
The decision came after the January verdict and before its full reasoning was public, a vacuum that lawyers say the government is exploiting.
The Mongabay investigation that surfaced this tension details how other projects are moving too, including the Sikles Annapurna Cable Car, even as litigants and conservation lawyers wait for the Supreme Court to release the principles that should govern development inside protected areas.
Meanwhile, on June 6, 2025, responding to a petition by the Lawyers’ Association for Human Rights of Nepalese Indigenous Peoples (LAHURNIP), the Supreme Court ruled that federal, provincial, and local governments must align all future law and policymaking with ILO 169 and UNDRIP, and secure FPIC from Indigenous peoples before taking measures that affect them. Rights groups hailed the decision as a long-overdue enforcement mechanism for treaties that Nepal embraced nearly two decades ago.
Nepal ratified ILO Convention 169 in 2007, becoming the first country in South Asia to do so. It also voted in favor of UNDRIP that same year; however, implementation has lagged behind with multiple assessments chronicling systemic failures to operationalize FPIC in hydropower and other infrastructure projects.
In the protected areas case, senior environmental lawyer Prakash Mani Sharma argues that the government’s continued approvals show a lack of accountability and disrespect for the Court. Justice Sapana Pradhan Malla, concurring with the majority, has signaled that conservation and development must not be treated as mutually exclusive.
The stakes are more than legal. Nepal’s 12 national parks, one wildlife reserve, one hunting reserve and six conservation areas stretch from the Terai, where communities were historically displaced to make way for parks, to highland regions like Annapurna, Sagarmatha, and Manaslu, where communities face severe restrictions on infrastructure, energy access, and livelihoods. Pushing mega-projects through these landscapes without transparent legal guidance and without FPIC risks compounding historical injustices while shifting ecological and cultural costs onto local people.
For now, Nepal sits in a holding pattern of its own making; but at least these two powerful Supreme Court decisions are pointing the state in the right direction.
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