No Justice, No Peace: Canadian Mining in Ecuador and Impunity
On December 2, 2006, 14 paramilitaries…fired into a group of unarmed Ecuadorian campesinos...resisting a copper mining project…This assault led three of the local campesinos…to file a lawsuit against the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) and Copper Mesa Corporation, the Canadian mining company responsible...[A] Liberal Member of Parliament from Canada…introduced legislation that would have been a concrete first step in holding Canadian mining companies accountable for their behavior overseas. Bill C-300…was voted down...[W]hen…the Court of Appeals in Canada ruled against the three…[t]he court basically said that people overseas have no right to sue a Canadian institution or company for human rights violations in Canadian courts…When the judicial system so utterly fails to guarantee minimum justice in cases of clear abuses by transnational corporations, or when the litigation is economically so out of reach for the majority of effected people, what other route is there for communities to seek justice? [also refers to Ecuacorriente (part of Corriente Resources), Chevron]