As a result of this visit we wrote a report about human rights violations and presented it to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Geneva. A water engineer from Honduras also presented the report and his concerns about mining. We found that there are breaches of the right to health and a healthy environment. This includes the right of people to participate in decisions affecting them. We also found that there were breaches of the right to self determination, right to an adequate standard of living and the right to just and favourable conditions of work.
We recommended that the General Law on Mining needs to be reformed. The environmental controls are currently ineffective. Water studies reveal high levels of heavy metals, lead, mercury, arsenic and iron in the river systems in the mining areas.
The people living in the mining areas should be consulted about decisions which will effect their lives so profoundly, and the EIS should be conducted by the Government with input from the people and not paid for by the mining companies.
We recommended that communities be legally represented when they are being petitioned to relocate so that they can negotiate fairly with mining companies. The granting of mining licenses should be subject to review by the Public Prosecutor’s Office for the Protection of the Environment as currently there is no review process.
While we recognize the right of Honduras to exploit its natural resources, the rights of the Honduran people to self determination, an adequate standard of living and to health should not be violated in this process. Effective environmental protections must be enshrined in the General Mining Law to ensure that people’s lives are not endangered by gold mining.
After presenting the report and hearing from the Government of Honduras, the Committee made its report on Honduras including recommendations. A lot of the issues which we had raised in the report were included in the recommendations to the Government. This was a substantial achievement as it meant that the Government had to take some of the concerns we raised more seriously. The downside is that there is no sanction for the Government not complying with the recommendations.
Since that time, the Center for Economic and Social Rights and the local NGOs in Honduras jointly organized 2 separate workshops based on the report, the Covenant and the final recommendations. The first workshop in July 2001 was for about 35 key NGOs and community members in Honduras. Human Rights provide another tool for communities, with which to negotiate with the Government and mining companies. There is a fledgling national movement which is taking action against the gold mining companies and the Center for Economic and Social Rights is supporting this movement. I gave a further workshop to another grouping of communities at one of the mine sites about human rights in February 2002. In this workshop it became apparent how human rights as concepts can articulate in a formal way, people’s sense of wrong and injustice.
We are currently working on easy to read materials about mining and human rights for Honduras. We’re also finalizing some fact sheets for use in Honduras.
ON a regional level, in February of this year we co-organised a 3 day regional meeting between mining activists and community members from Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua and El Salvador. This was a great success as it enabled links to be made between countries and activists and community members heard about strategies which had worked in other countries. Some of these include:
On an international level, in December 2001 a meeting was held to launch a Global Mining Campaign. CESR has been an active member in devising strategy and participating in this coalition with a human rights perspective.
Some of these activities have been around the WSSD process, others have been about putting together case studies from the various regions which document problems with mining, including human rights, creating a demand set for what the campaign (NGOs and communities) want and responding to the Mining, Mineral and Sustainable Development Report which the mining industry has sponsored. The conference launching the industry’s recent report is what I have just come from in Toronto Canada.
Achievements:
Documenting human rights violations
Educating NGOs in Honduras about economic, social and cultural rights and giving them some tools to pressure government with
Raising environmental (food, health, water, standard of living, housing) issues at the Committee
Raising mining as a threat to ESCR at Committee level
Getting concluding observations which reflected our concerns
Facilitating links between countries around mining issues
Calling mining companies to account on a human rights basis
Inserting a human rights framework into NGO coalition key critique documents
Due to resource difficulties in Honduras, it is hard to get a national resistance movement formed. Although Honduras is not a huge country, traveling between mines sites is very time consuming. The telecommunications infrastructure is not highly developed.
Additionally the mining companies have huge wealth with which to ensure that the law remains in its very lax and permissive form. The NGOs who are working on this issue are not environmental specific, but rather are doing a broad range of work, of which mining is just one of the activities.
Despite these challenges, the awareness of environmental concerns and how human rights are affected by gold mining, has increased substantially in the last year. There has been extensive media coverage of these issues with public debates and the Catholic church taking a position on the issue. These are exciting and encouraging steps in the struggle to ensure that economic, social and cultural rights are respected in the practice of gold mining.
Another challenge which is a spin off effect of wealth of mining companies, is the creation of disunity within communities. For example in San Andres, the community where I gave the workshop in February, some of the people like the mine, rely on it for work. They are not looking long term to how they will earn a living once the mine closes. But the company plays people off against each other. How to deal with this?
The role of the state is effectively nullified because it has been become captured by the mining companies.
Let’s look more deeply,
The fundamental advantage of human rights law is that it enables community members and those directly affected by mining to conceive of themselves as actors. As Phillip Alston in discussing whether ESCR make any difference states :
“The reality, of course, is that it makes a world of difference. Needs can be deferred until those in power think it might be timely to address them. Needs can be defined and formulated by experts; they are usually seen to be eminently flexible and relative…Rights, on the other hand, belong to individuals, who can and will assert them, and strive to give them meaning and substance. They can be neither expropriated, nor defined, nor arbitrarily put on the back burner, by officials.” (Foreword by Phillip Alston in Philrights report on economic, social and cultural rights quoted in green, p 1095)
“The real potential of human rights lies in its ability to change the way people perceive themselves in relation to the government and other actors. Rights rhetoric provides a mechanism for reanalyzing and renaming “problems” as “violations” and, as such something that need not and should not be tolerated….
Rights make it clear that violations are neither inevitable nor natural, but arise from deliberate decisions and policies.”(60 jochnick)
An extension of this is participatory rights education.