Photo by Blue Planet Project campaigner Meera Karunananthan during a May 2013 fact-finding mission in El Salvador.
The Blue Planet celebrates the rejection of OceanaGold’s challenge against El Salvador, but highlights that the challenge should never have been allowed and that the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) is still highly problematic.
Telesur reports, “A little-known but controversial World Bank tribunal actually ruled against corporate power [on October 14], rejecting Canadian-Australian gold mining giant OceanaGold’s claim that El Salvador interfered with its profits when the government pulled the plug on a proposed gold mine. The seven-year, multi-million dollar, largely secretive court battle had pitted mining-affected Salvadoran communities — supported by human rights organizations in North America, Australia, and the Philippines — against the deep pockets of OceanaGold, formerly Pacific Rim, in an international trade tribunal that has been criticized as a kangaroo court.”
The article explains, “The conflict sparking the US$301 million lawsuit dates back to 2007, when El Salvador took a stand for national sovereignty and clean water by denying OceanaGold, then Pacific Rim, a new permit to extract gold in the Central American country. …The government primarily rejected OceanaGold’s proposed mine over fears of water pollution and scarcity in the country, the most water-stressed in Central America. Water quality is a major problem in El Salvador, where some 90 percent of surface water resources are considered unsafe to drink by international standards. Metal mining has been a big offender in fomenting the contamination crisis.”
The corporation’s lawsuit amounted to the equivalent of three years of El Salvador’s public spending on health, education and public security combined.
Blue Planet Project campaigner Meera Karunananthan comments, “Salvadoran movements have been pushing for bold initiatives addressing the country’s environmental challenges, including a more robust water policy and a permanent ban on metal mining, but these policy proposals have been stalled under the threat of this lawsuit. As long as the country is forced to adhere to trade and investment rules that enabled the lawsuit in the first place, it will be extremely challenging for Salvadorans to maintain their sovereignty over environmental and social policy.”
And Blue Planet Project founder Maude Barlow says, “At a time of water scarcity, it is unconscionable for the global trade and investment regime to deny governments of water-stressed countries like El Salvador the policy space to protect local watersheds and ensure the realization of the human right to water.”
The Blue Planet Project first expressed solidarity with El Salvador against the proposed mine in May 2008.
Our actions between 2008 and November 2013 can be read here. In March 2014, we joined with other civil society groups to release a report calling on OceanaGold to “respect the democratic process in El Salvador, abandon its acquisition of Pacific Rim Mining, and drop its lawsuit against the government of El Salvador for not having permitted a mine.” In September 2014, Barlow joined with allies to deliver a letter to the Toronto office of OceanaGold. The letter demanded that the company withdraw their lawsuit against the people of El Salvador. Days later Barlow spoke at a protest rally in Washington, DC against OceanaGold and the World Bank tribunal process.
Among other protests, we also participated in a rally outside the OceanaGold annual shareholders meeting in Toronto this past June.
The Blue Planet Project also supports the right to water being enshrined in El Salvador’s constitution. The governing FMLN party wants this, but it is being blocked by the conservative-dominated Congress. In March 2014, Karunananthan visited El Salvador to support the inclusion of the right to water in their constitution. For more on that, please see The right to water struggle continues in El Salvador which also links to blogs dating back to October 2011.
