"International court rules against Guatemala in a landmark Indigenous and environmental rights case", 17 December 2023

Guatemala violated Indigenous rights by permitting a huge nickel mine on tribal land almost two decades ago, according to a ruling from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights Friday.

The landmark verdict marks a monumental step in a four-decade struggle for Indigenous land rights and a long, bitter legal battle...

According to a verdict...the Guatemalan government violated the rights of the Indigenous Q’eqchi’ people to property and consultation by permitting mining on land where members of the community have lived at least since the 1800s.

In its written sentence, the court linked the human rights violations to “inadequacies in domestic law,” which fail to recognize Indigenous property and ordered the state to adopt new laws...

“All countries in Latin America are going to look at this decision,” Crippa [of the Indian Law Resource Center representing the community] said. “All courts will have to secure that any decision that this made on mining, on Indigenous lands or titling of Indigenous land is done in a way that is consistent with what the court decided today.”

The court also ordered an immediate stop to all mining activities, gave Guatemala six months to begin awarding a land title to the community, and ordered the creation of a development fund. No further mining can take place, it said, without the community’s consent...

For Rodrigo Tot, a local leader, the verdict is vindication of a lifelong battle against the mine and the state which took his own son’s life.

Guatemala first granted massive exploratory permits at the Fenix mine in eastern Guatemala to Canadian company Hudbay just under two decades ago. In 2009, the mine’s head of security shot Tot’s son dead. Hudbay sold the site to a local subsidiary of Swiss-based Solway Investment Group two years later...

A spokesperson for Solway wrote that the company and its subsidiary were “not a party to this case” and that “disagreements regarding the mismatch in land demarcation began even before our company acquired the project.”...