Hugo Jabini is a Saramaka Maroon 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 ressort 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. Land rights activism 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. Political career In May 2010, Jabini was elected member of the Surinamese National Assembly as part of the NDP slate of candidates in the multiethnic political coalition called Megacombinatie. After the Megacombinatie reached a deal to form a government with the Maroon parties of A-Combinatie, Jabini found himself in the governing coalition for the entirety of its five-year term. He was also chosen from among fifteen candidates as a member of Parliamentarians for Global Action. Continued land rights advocacy In his capacity as VSG spokesman, Jabini expressed concern in November 2010 about a new government initiative to link Paramaribo to Brazil by road using a route through Saamaka territory. The following month Jabini announced, again in his capacity as VSG spokesman, that the Saamaka people would give the government more time to implement the requirements of the Saamaka Verdict, though the implementation was already past-due. By 2012, Jabini had become critical of the ruling party of which he was a member, telling the newspaper Starnieuws that barely anything had been done