WHAT ARE THE LEGAL CLAIMS/REMEDIES BEING SOUGHT BY VICTIMS OF DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS?
One of the major problems for victims of development projects is the use of local remedies for dealing with environmental and human rights abuses. From my experience in Honduras the local remedies are almost non existent due to ineffective courts, corruption and lack of knowledge and experience in dealing with mining issues as well as lack of jurisdiction. Local remedies can be good for bringing attention/pressure to bear eg placing complaints/denunciations at the Environmental Ombudsman.
Another mechanism being used is the UN. In early 2001 the Center was approached by a leading human rights activist Juan Almendares from Honduras for assistance in dealing with the increasing number of gold mines being opened. After a fact finding mission in March/April 2001, we wrote a report detailing human rights violations specifically for 2 mines, San Andrés and San Martín. The violations include: forcible relocation of communities from their lands, no legal title provided to the owners of the new houses, lack of consultation about the type of housing or design of the new community which means that the houses do not have a plot of land around them for small food crops and raising animals, people live within 42 meters of a cyanide heap leaching pad and complain of increased skin and respiratory diseases, consumption of large quantities of water and sand by mines in drought ridden areas. Water studies reveal high levels of heavy metals, lead, mercury, arsenic and iron in the river systems in the mining areas.
In addition to these specific problems, there are problems with the law itself, the General Mining Law 1999. The aim of the law is to create favourable conditions for foreign investment in the process of reconstruction following Hurricane Mitch. It gives wide sfar reaching powers to mining companies with ineffective environmental protections or provision for people to participate in decisions which affect their health.
We wrote a report detailing the human rights abuses and presented it to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Geneva. This Committee was reviewing Honduras’ compliance with its obligations under the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights for the 1st time. Each country is reviewed for its compliance on a 5 yearly basis. 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 be reformed as the environmental controls are currently ineffective.
After presenting the report and hearing from the Government of Honduras, the Committee made its report on Honduras and included a lot of the specific recommendations which we had asked for in their concluding observations to the Government.
INNOVATIVE STRATEGIES
Since that time, the Center and the local NGOs in Honduras jointly organized a workshop based on the report, the Covenant and the final recommendations, for about 35 key NGOs and community members in Honduras. A further workshop was run in February of this year for community members and municipal authorities about human rights and the ICESCR’s recommendations. There is a fledgling national movement which is taking action against the gold mining companies and the Center is supporting this movement. We are currently working on easy to read materials about mining and human rights for Honduras. We are also trying to link Honduran activists with struggles against mining in other parts of the world including Latin America. A part of that larger struggle is the Global Mining Campaign. We co-organised a regional meeting with representatives from Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama in February of this year to share experiences and form joint strategies.
Despite the challenges of distance, lack of resources in NGOs and the wealth of the mining industry, awareness of environmental concerns and how human rights are affected by gold mining has increased substantially in the last few months in Honduras. There has been extensive media coverage of these issues with public debates and the Catholic Church took 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.