More than 270 people were killed, the drinking water of thousands of people was contaminated and the environment destroyed when the B1 dam near Brumadinho in Brazil broke on 25 January 2019. Only four months prior, German auditor TÜV SÜD confirmed the dam’s safety when its Brazilian subsidiary issued a stability declaration. For this reason, on 15 October 2019, five of those affected by the dam failure, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) and MISEREOR filed complaints against the German certification company and one of its employees. The accusations: negligent homicide, private bribery, causing a flood by negligence, and violating supervisory duties...

Vale S.A. [...] rejects all responsibility for the dam failure at its mine, citing TÜV SÜD and the test results of its Brazilian subsidiary. Certifiers’ roles in the global economy are controversial...

“Human rights due diligence and the care for nature must take precedence over corporate economic interests. The action of TÜV SÜD shows that we urgently need a binding law for corporations to ensure that this is not left to a company’s discretion...,” said Pirmin Spiegel, Managing Director of MISEREOR.