To Governments:
Nearly 700 organisations signed under this letter to urge government s to take a lead in ensuring countries around the world do not face a wave of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) cases arising from actions taken to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing economic crisis.
To read the full letter and to join others and sign your organisation tap here!
Two (2) of Asia’s Dirty Companies — Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) and Tokio Marine are holding their Annual Shareholders/ Meetings on Monday, June 29 @ 10 am Tokyo Time.
Please join us Tweet the Message #TotalCoalExitNow using their official Twitter Accounts — @mufgbk_official and @tokiomarine.
Thank you very much! – Asian People’s Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD)
The Big Shift coalition has sent a letter on the 27th of May to the World Bank Group Board and management requesting that the review process for the Bank’s Policy Lending arm be made transparent and inclusive, allowing civil society organizations to provide critical input into it, among other things.
Read the full letter here!
The mining industry is one of the most polluting, deadly, and destructive industries in the
world. Yet to date, mining company responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have received
little scrutiny compared to other industries seeking to profit from this crisis.
We, the undersigned organizations, condemn and reject the ways that the mining industry
and numerous governments are taking advantage of the pandemic to manufacture new
mining opportunities and establish a positive public image, now and for the future.
These actions pose an immediate threat to the health and safety of communities and
organizations that have been struggling to defend public health and their environments
against the destruction and devastation of mining extractivism for decades, as well as to the
safety of workers in the mining sector.
Read the full petition here!
Join us and sign the petition here!
The US Human Rights Network’s UPR Task Force drafted the attached letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and to the President of the Human Rights Council urging them to re-open the stakeholder report submissions for the upcoming 36th session of the Universal Periodic Review, tentatively scheduled for November 2020. This will allow for necessary supplemental submissions with recent updates regarding human rights during COVID-19, providing a more accurate assessment of the human rights situation in the United States and other countries that will be reviewed during the 36th session.
Read the full letter here!
The Draft was submitted to Ikh Khural on May 10th
Read the draft here!
Eight organisations that put questions to Rio Tinto at its London AGM on 8 April (or, to be precise, at the connected ‘shareholder engagement session’) are still waiting for adequate answers to their questions more than a month after the event. So we have written an open letter to Rio Tinto’s Chief Executive Office, Jean-Sebastien Jacques, setting out the questions again. Some were answered at the time, but wholly inadequately. Some have not been answered at all. We have asked the company to respond within three weeks.
Read the letter here!
London Mining Network has published a new report entitled ‘Cut and run: How Britain’s top two mining companies have wrecked ecosystems without being held to account’. The report includes examples from Southeast Asia of where the British-Australian multinationals BHP and Rio Tinto have left legacies of conflict and environmental destruction, long after they’ve fled the scene.
Recent examples of mining messes include Brumadinho, the tailings (mining waste) dam owned by Brazilian mining company Vale, which collapsed in January 2019 in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Vale executives, along with its German advisors TUV Sud, were recently charged with the homicide of 272 people; 14 people are still missing. Vale, along with BHP, jointly own the Samarco iron ore mine and tailings dam which also collapsed in 2015, causing Brazil’s worst environmental disaster in history and the deaths of 20 people. The trauma due to loss of life, displacement and job loss and the environmental repercussions of contamination of river systems in both catastrophes will be felt for decades to come. The entire mining industry needs to be held to account for such mining messes, and laws made which demand the cleaning up of messes made by mining companies before they pull out of projects.
Curtailed freedoms
The lockdown has led to the curtailment of fundamental freedoms including, freedom of assembly, freedom of information, and even freedom of speech.
“In Mongolia, we have seen the police stop any attempt to voice a protest even with just one or two persons doing live streaming,” said Sukhgerel Durgunsen, Director of Oyu Tolgoi (OT) Watch. “There have been arrests and people were detained without court orders while projects opposed by the public are being moved forward using lock down situation.”