London-listed mining companies
Mines and Communities is an international network of communities impacted by mining companies, and organisations supporting those communities. Its main work is the hosting of the Mines and Communities (MAC) website, which contains a vast amount of information about the damaging activities of hundreds of mining companies around the world and the strategies which communities are using to resist destructive mining projects. The four British member groups of MAC – Down to Earth, Partizans, PIPLinks and the Society of St Columban – are also members of London Mining Network.
Need to know which banks and institutions are funding which mining companies – and where? From Money to Metal is an indispensable, frequently updated database with helpful analysis.
Business and Human Rights Resource Centre
The non-profit Business & Human Rights Resource Centre runs a free online portal to bring together and demystify lawsuits from across the world alleging human rights abuses by companies. The portal summarises cases in non-legal language, giving the positions of each side. It also presents special commentaries by experts. Cases profiled include London-listed mining company BHP Billiton, sued in Australia and Papua New Guinea over pollution by its mine in Papua New Guinea.
Coal mining and use
member group, and a grassroots campaigning organisation. CAN works to end open-cast coal mining and burning coal for electricity in the UK. They do this by working in solidarity with communities affected by open-cast coal mining and pollution, both in the UK and internationally towards a just end to coal now.Dark Materials: the consequences of clinging to coal: a report for the Mines and Communities network.
CoalSwarm is a useful website for information on coal: an on-line collaborative information clearinghouse on U.S. and international coal mines, plants, companies, politics, impacts, and alternatives.
End Coal provides a resource for local communities, activists, students and researchers who would like to learn more about why coal is not the solution to the world’s energy needs and how we can work to stop the expansion of coal and promote better alternatives for meeting energy needs.
No Opencast Coal is the website of the Loose Anti-Opencast Network (LAON) in the UK, providing news about anti-opencast struggles and UK government policy on coal.
Energy alternatives
This website shows you two possible futures. The first, fossil-fuelled future is the one we’re heading for if we carry on down our current energy path. This is the future that current government policies and business practices will take us to, according to mainstream energy experts. This is a future of runaway climate change and widespread human suffering. In the second, cleaner and fairer future, we show you how it is possible to provide everyone on the planet with a high quality lifestyle, with access to education, medical care, efficient transport, comfortable homes, and entertainment, all powered by existing clean energy technologies. It also includes a Two Energy Futures briefing.
Adivasi resistance to mining and militarisation in India
(Note: the tables in the report contain distressing images.)
In June 2024, London Mining Network worked in collaboration with three Indian diaspora organisations (International Solidarity for Academic Freedom in India, India Justice Project and Foundation The London Story) and the Forum Against Corporatization and Militarization (FACAM), a Delhi-based platform of Indian civil society organisations with presence on the ground, to submit a report for the fourth review of India’s performance in fulfilling its obligations to the United Nations’ International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). This report focuses on ICCPR violations taking place in the southern region of Chhattisgarh commonly known as Bastar Division, comprising the seven districts of Bastar, Dantewada, Bijapur, Narayanpur, Sukma, Kondagaon and Kanker, between 2021 and 2024. These violations range from extrajudicial killings to torture and arbitrary arrests under sedition and anti-terrorism laws. The report notes that these violations have been ongoing for nearly two decades but have significantly worsened since 2016, including five reported episodes of aerial warfare in the Bijapur and Sukma districts between 2021 and 2024. The detailed analysis also provides evidence of lack of legal remedies for extrajudicial killings including denial of due process and fair trial, sexual violence against women, forced displacement of Adivasis, intimidation and harassment of journalists and repression of the right to freedom of assembly.
In February 2023, a group of concerned Indian citizens, including Professor Nandini Sundar, whose book ‘The Burning Forest’ on Bastar was discussed in LMN’s Resist Mining book club in January 2024, came together in February 2023 to investigate the reasons behind the growth of large-scale protests by Adivasi communities across the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh against the proliferation of security camps and laying of wide roads on their lands. The teams found that an absence of land records and surveys is enabling the administration to appropriate cultivated lands for mining projects, without the free, prior informed consent of the people as constitutionally mandated by the Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act 1996 (PESA Act) and the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (FRA), laws specifically passed to safeguard the land rights of Adivasi people in central and eastern India. The team also found a lack of accountability among the administration for massive deforestation, lack of recognition of forest rights of the Adivasi people, severe repression of the opposition by villagers to the take-over of their ancestral lands, increase in surveillance at militarized police camp checkpoints, making everyday life difficult for villagers, slow provision, if any, of welfare measures in comparison to the speed with which the police camps and roads are being built, the network and scale of which are clear indications of government’s priorities and intent. That is these are meant for the state and corporates to access and exploit the lands on which the communities reside. The report concludes that there is an urgent need for respect for law by the state and corporates with implementation of PESA 1996 and FRA 2006 provisions in letter and spirit for the Adivasis to be able to live as equal citizens and benefit from the development in whose names their human rights are being violated.
- Under The Surface: Human Rights and Environmental Implications of the Proposed Sijimali Bauxite Mine in Odisha, Human Rights Lawyering Clinic, Bangalore, April 2024
An Indigenous Adivasi people’s movement is ongoing against the proposed Sijimali bauxite mine (M/S Vedanta Ltd) in Rayagada and Kalahandi districts of Odisha. These districts are both Fifth Scheduled Areas and home to a rich biodiverse environment, which has been severely strained n recent decades due to mining activity carried out with flagrant disregard of the human rights of local Adivasi communities and key principles of environmental governance. The report provides an helpful overview of the extensive international and domestic normative and legal frameworks, including the instruments for safeguarding the human, fundamental and constitutional rights of local Adivasi communities, and the due processes that underpin the governance and approval of large mining projects in India. (This review is also helpful when considering mining projects in other Fifth Schedule Areas of India as well.) The main part of the report focuses the claimed and potential human and environmental impacts of the proposed Sijimali bauxite mine. These include the violation of human and fundamental rights of Adivasis, their right to autonomy and FPIC, that are even preceding the establishment of the mine. It notes that these violations are linked to the continued colonial perception of the dominant elite of the Adivasis as backward peoples Regarding the environment, the report highlights the potential long-term harms, including “permanent loss of endangered and vulnerable biodiversity in the region” (p.12). The report’s recommendations include the need to ensure that the right to autonomy and FPIC of the Adivasi peoples’ are upheld by those administering, governing and carrying out mining operations on the lands of the Indigenous peoples. The research conducted for this report was part of a 6-month clinical workshop on human rights lawyering held in 2023–2024 that “emerges from the rich traditions of lawyering as part of various human rights movements in India, particularly from the 1980s onwards, which seek to mobilize legal redress and representation in cases of human rights violations within a frequently hostile legal system” (p.3).
Related organisations
Amnesty runs a Business and Human Rights campaign. It believes that all companies have a responsibility to respect human rights in their operations. It believes that the business community also has a wider responsibility – moral and legal – to use its influence to promote respect for human rights. It aims to change law and regulations to ensure that companies are accountable for the human rights impacts of their operations.
BankTrack is a global network of civil society organisations and individuals tracking the operations of the private financial sector (commercial banks, investors, insurance companies, pension funds) and its effect on people and the planet.
BHP Billiton Watch is an informal network of communities and organisations across the world who are concerned about the impacts of the world’s largest diversified resources company (active in mining, oil and gas). Archive: their website hasn’t been updated for a few years.
Carnival of Dirt is an alliance of community groups and others (including London Mining Network and Occupy LSX) working to expose the destructive impacts of mining and oil around the world, beginning with a ‘funeral procession’ in London on 15 June 2012 to commemorate those who have been killed for their opposition to mining and oil projects.
CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development) works to better understand the positive and negative impacts of the private sector on development, with a particular focus on extractive industries, transparency, tackling corruption, human rights due diligence and the implementation of the UN’s business and human rights guiding principles.
Corporations are one of the most potent forces dictating and circumscribing how our lives are lived and undermining the survival of the world’s ecosystems. Ways of effectively challenging their power and fighting for real democracy are being constricted. This project, run by LMN member group Corporate Watch, aims to explore the ways in which corporations exercise power over the decisions made in what we call a democracy, and the ways in which their ideologies and discourses facilitate this by co-opting and/or suppressing people’s active democratic participation.
The Counter Olympics Network questions the way in which the Olympic Games operate, their impacts on local communities and the commercialisation of athletics, including the role of corporate sponsorship by companies such as Rio Tinto and BP.
Environmental Investigation Agency
The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) is a London-based international campaigning organisation committed to investigating and exposing environmental crime.
EJOLT is a large collaborative project bringing science and society together to catalogue ecological conflicts and work towards confronting environmental injustice. The Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade project is an FP7 project supported by the European Commission that will run from 2011-2015. The project supports the work of Environmental Justice Organisations, uniting scientists, activist organisations, think-tanks, policy-makers from the fields of environmental law, environmental health, political ecology and ecological economics. For blogs, resources and maps on environmental conflicts see: http://www.ejolt.org/. In March 2014 EJOLT launched an interactive atlas of resource conflicts which it intends to update continuously.
The aim of the European Network for Indigenous Australian Rights (ENIAR) is to promote awareness on indigenous issues and to provide information for Indigenous Australians about Europe and international organisations.
Website mostly in Spanish, but with English language articles as well, on the impacts of the Cerrejon mine in the province of La Guajira in Colombia, and community resistance to it. The Cerrejon mine is owned by London-listed mining companies Anglo American, BHP Billiton and Glencore. This website is ‘the voice of La Guajira’ and is run with the help of CENSAT Agua Viva (Friends of the Earth Colombia).
Foil Vedanta is an indpendent group of activists challenging the activities of Vedanta and its subsidiaries.
The role of mining companies in Indonesian-controlled West Papua is one of the issues of greatest concern for those working for Papuan independence.
Friends of the Earth England Wales and Northern Ireland
FoE’s corporates campaign aims to challenge the power of huge corporations, among them mining companies.
Representing workers in mining, energy and manufacturing at the global level.
Friends of the Earth Netherlands (Milieudefensie) is a non-governmental (NGO) environmental organisation with more than 90,000 members and supporters and eighty local groups, conducting campaigns on climate change, globalisation, traffic, agriculture and conservation of the countryside.
Occupy London Stock Exchange, famous for its camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London, is critical of the enormous inequalities generated by the current financial system. Occupy organise talks and activities to draw attention to the negative impacts of companies listed on the London Stock Exchange and other aspects of the global economy.
Phulbari Resistance is an initiative of BanglaPraxis in solidarity with the communities resisting a proposed open pit coal mine in Phulbari, Bangladesh. Asia Energy Corporation (Bangladesh Pty Ltd), a hundred percent owned subsidiary of London-listed GCM Resources Plc, is proposing the project. GCM is backed by a number of private banks and hedge funds: RAB Capital, UBS AG, Credit Suisse, Barclays Plc etc.
Phulbari Solidarity Group exists to support and represent the communities located within the Phulbari region of Bangladesh in opposing the plans for a large open-plan mine in the region.
Protestbarrick.net serves as a portal to groups researching and organizing around mining issues, particularly involving Barrick Gold. It contains news articles, testimonies, and backgrounders about Barrick’s operations worldwide. The administrators of this site are volunteers with sincere concerns for communities negatively impacted by Barrick’s operations.
Saami Resources is a website about the contested ownership and use of Saami traditional lands and resources. The Saami people are the Indigenous people of Sápmi, Saamiland, covering the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Penninsula of Russia. Saami areas in Sweden are currently experiencing an explosion in mining and windpower development. There has been an increase in both Scandinavian and foreign companies in prospecting, mining and windpower.
SEAD (Scottish Education and Action for Development)
SEAD has two main aims:
* To challenge the causes of poverty, social injustice and environmental degradation
* To support the community-based movement for positive social change – people collectively tackling challenges which have both a local and global perspective.
The US organisation Center for Media and Democracy publishes SourceWatch, a collaborative resource for citizens and journalists looking for documented information about the corporations, industries, and people trying to influence public policy and public opinion. With the help of volunteer editors, SourceWatch focuses on the for-profit corporations, non-profit corporate front groups, PR teams, and so-called “experts” trying to influence public opinion on behalf of global corporations and the government agencies they have captured.
Survival International campaigns for the rights of tribal peoples, including peoples threatened by mining projects. Survival has for a long time supported Bushmen in Botswana resisting diamond mining on their land, and it is now also campaigning against Vedanta plc’s activities on tribal land in Orissa, India.