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GENEVA, Nov. 15 (Xinhua) -- A UN human rights expert warned Tuesday that law enforcement officials, private security firms and North Dakota's National Guard have used excessive force against Native Americans striving to protect sacred land from the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline.
"Tensions have escalated in the past two weeks, with local security forces employing an increasingly militarized response to protests and forcibly moving encampments located near the construction site," Maina Kiai, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, said in a statement.
"This is a troubling response to people who are taking action to protect natural resources and ancestral territory in the face of profit-seeking activity," he added.
Some 1,890 km long, the pipeline is being built to carry crude oil to a refinery in the vicinity of Chicago.
According to protesters, a number of sites sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe have already been bulldozed.
The Missouri River, which is also held sacred, is under threat as construction nears its shores.
The expert warned that some of the 400 people detained as a result of demonstrations suffered both "inhuman and degrading conditions in detention."
"Marking people with numbers and detaining them in overcrowded cages, on the bare concrete floor, without being provided with medical care, amounts to inhuman and degrading treatment," he explained.
According to reports, protesters have said that they faced rubber bullets, teargas, mace, compression grenades and bean-bag rounds while expressing their concerns over the environmental impact and the need to protect burial grounds and other sacred sites to the indigenous tribe.
While acknowledging that some protesters had turned violent, Kiai reminded that this could not be used as a reason to justify such forceful treatment.
"The use of violence by some protesters should not be used as a justification to nullify the peaceful assembly rights of everyone else," he concluded.
