This is the second session of the 6th International Rights of Nature Tribunal’s road towards the UNFCCC COP30 to be held in Bélem, Brazil in November 2025. This road is made out of two sessions addressing two of the major threats to the Rights of Nature and its defenders, and the main causes for the environmental and climate crisis our planet is facing: 

1. The fossil fuel industry, to be addressed during ‘The End of the Fossil Fuel Era’ session at New York Climate Week on September 22nd, 2024.
2. The mining industry, to be addressed during ‘The Post-Extractivism Non-Mining Era’ session  to be held in Canada in March 2025, simultaneously to the Prospectors & Developers Association Canada (PDAC) Convention, that represents some of the world’s biggest mining interests.

In preparation for both of these sessions, the Tribunal will gather material from cases all over the world affected by these industries. The findings of both sessions will be presented during the COP30 Tribunal in Bélem in November 2025, at a last session: ‘A New Pact with Mother Earth’.

During its November 2021 hearing in Glasgow, the International Rights of Nature Tribunal addressed the critical case of the Amazon. The case presenters petitioned for an on-site visit to understand the threats facing the Amazon and to speak with its defenders in their territory. The final judgment of the hearing stated that :

“Actions of the Tribunal in the Amazon territory: Promote an in situ visit by a delegation of the International Tribunal on the Rights of Nature to the Amazonian territory to verify the serious evidence presented in this hearing, prior to the FOSPA Meeting in July 2022 in Pará – Brazil, in coordination with the organizations of the World Assembly of the Amazon.” 

The request was accepted and in July 2022, a delegation led by Brazilian judge Felicio Pontes, alongside Cormac Cullinan (South Africa), Ailton Krenak (Brazil), Ana Carolina Alfinito (Brazil), Blanca Chancosa (Ecuador), Maial Paiakan Kayapó (Brazil) and Tom Goldtooth (Diné Dakota) visited the Xingu and Carajás territories.

The delegation visited the municipality of Altamira, a territory scarred by the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, the third biggest worldwide, and threatened by the opening of the Belo Sun mine. They met members and families of the affected communities fighting an endless battle for their territories against foreign mining companies. The delegation witnessed the everyday violence against agriculture communities in Gleba Bacajá and the Maraá communities in the Carajá region in a constant context of land struggle against mining companies. The delegation ended its visit at the Foro Social Panamazónico in Belém, where it presented its report in partnership with the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), the Movement of Those Affected by Mining (MAM) and the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST).

The delegation observed the visited Carajá corridor as the most violent and degraded areas of the Amazon, where Nature has been turned into a resource pool for mining and cattle raising and where, for decades, these precious ecosystems, its inhabitants, and Indigenous and agriculture communities are facing deforestation, land grabbing, persecution, contamination, and violations of their rights.

The Case of the Belo Sun Mining Project

The Belo Sun project, led by a Canadian mining company, aims to develop Brazil’s largest open-pit gold mine. Local residents and advocacy groups have resisted the project for over a decade due to its potential to harm critical ecosystems and communities. Legal battles continue as a Brazilian federal court recently annulled land concessions for the project, a partial victory for activists. According to its own website, Belo Sun is a “Canadian, development stage mining company that is advancing Brazil’s largest undeveloped gold deposit at the Volta Grande Project in Pará State”. For a decade now local residents and movements have resisted this project that would threaten the critical river ecosystem and its human and non-human inhabitants. Belo Sun has been accused of illegally acquiring public land, several violations of environmental and public participation obligations and procedures, as well as unlawfully criminalizing land defenders. In the latest news, a Brazilian federal court declared the contract granting the land concessions for the mine project between Brazil’s National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) and Belo Sun null and void. This remains a partial victory, and future developments remain to be seen as Belo Sun, in its official responses, stated that it would “work with INCRA to resolve this issue.”

As an outcry for the urgency and severity of the situation, the Xingu communities, with the support of the Xingu Vivo para Sempre (MXVP) collective, have initiated a petition to convene a Rights of Nature Tribunal to address the issues stemming from mining projects within their territory, which are backed by Canadian foreign investments. The International Rights of Nature Tribunal recognizes that the distressing circumstances faced by the environment and the residents of the Amazon’s Xingu region are not isolated incidents, but rather symptomatic of a broader global mining industry, often funded by northern states, with Canada at the forefront who are depleting the planet in various regions. In response to this alarming trend, the Tribunal has received the petition and has taken the initiative to organize the next hearing.

The mining industry: global impacts

Mining has been part of human history for centuries. Whether as part of the primary or energy sector, human societies have been sustained by extracting minerals and fossil fuels such as copper, aluminum, precious stones, iron, marble, oil, natural gas, and carbon.

Through a rapidly spreading discourse of modernization and development, more and more resources have been needed and mining activities all over the world have expanded and intensified. New techniques have been introduced and developed to carry out large-scale extraction projects all over the face of the planet.

Nowadays, the mining industry has been completely globalized, functioning through its own markets. National and multinational mining companies, both public and private, operate and invest in projects spread over the 5 continents.

One of the protagonists of this global mining industry is Canada. In a recent briefing, MiningWatch Canada summarized the country’s role in global mining as follows:

The same briefing states that “harm caused or contributed to by Canadian mining companies, their subsidiaries, and contractors overseas is widespread globally and persistent. It includes environmental degradation that will persist for hundreds of years, a wide range of human rights harms, abuses of Indigenous rights, as well as negative economic and financial impacts at local and national levels. Together, these impacts have serious and long-term repercussions on local and national development”. These impacts are largely documented on the MiningWatch Canada website and have also been the subject of reports in front of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. These include both human rights violations and violations of the Rights of Mother Earth, among which : 

Despite this significant environmental and human toll, Canada persists in its relentless pursuit of resource extraction. In 2023, it enacted a set of amendments designed to expedite the development of mining projects and actively advanced its mining interests. In March 2024, Toronto hosted the “World’s Premier Mineral Exploration and Mining Convention,” which touts itself as the foremost gathering for individuals, companies, and organizations involved in mineral exploration, expecting to draw over 30,000 attendees from 130+ countries. 

Furthermore, illustrative of its role in the global mining industry, Canada holds the Prospectors and Development Association of Canada (PDAC) annual conference. PDAC calls itself the “leading voice of the mineral exploration and development community, an industry that employs more than 665,000 individuals, and contributed $125 billion to Canada’s GDP in 2021”, stating its work centers on “supporting a competitive, responsible, and sustainable mineral sector”. Its conferences are an annual highlight for global stakeholders of the mining industry. 

For all the reasons above and with a dual objective in mind – to decry Canada’s lack of awareness and failure in upholding its human and environmental rights obligations and to propose an alternative and critical platform in response, the International Rights of Nature Tribunal has chosen to host this next hearing in Toronto, during the 2025 edition of the PDAC Conference. 

This hearing will be the second session of the 6th International hearing of the Rights of Nature Tribunal. The first session was held in September 2024 during  Climate Week in New York:  “The End of the Fossil Fuel Era”. This first session served as a platform to showcase the fact that, contrary to all scientific recommendations and internationally agreed-upon measures, States continue to massively invest in fossil fuel infrastructure. This hearing served as a statement, backed by cases from all regions of the world, that the fossil fuel industry damages ecosystems and their inhabitants and is a major driver of the climate crisis via its massive carbon emissions. The judgment was unanimous: rethinking our societies without fossil fuels is a matter of survival. 

Nevertheless, this “rethinking” must also be done with caution. While “Ending the Fossil Fuel Era” was a beautiful title for this first session, the Tribunal recognizes that this “end” can be tricky when thinking about how to guarantee the functions fossil fuels currently fulfill in our society such as fuel for transportation, energy and heating generation for buildings and households, power plants, etc.

In trying to solve this issue with climate mitigation and energy transition policies to increase low-carbon infrastructures and technologies, the trap of “green extractivism” arises. In addition to the extraction of minerals for traditional industries, another type of extractivism of minerals to support the often-called “green transition” toward low-carbon societies appears. The new infrastructures and technologies for such low-carbon societies require many precious minerals like lithium, cobalt, graphite, copper, and nickel. An often-mentioned example of this is the transition to electric cars to decarbonize the transport sector. Batteries for these cars require a massive amount of lithium, justifying a new type of “green mining”. Mining these minerals then becomes “portrayed as an urgent (…) issue to supply the military, technological, electric vehicle and low-carbon energy industries. As a growing number of scholars write, this policy approach, however, transforms mining ecosystems- and the acquisition, processing, and smelting of raw materials- into environmentalism, and consequently constructs mining, industrial production, and economic growth as the pathway towards climate change mitigation” (Dunlap and Riquito, p.4). This way, claims and promises of economic development and climate mitigation for the “common good” are being used to further justify global statist-capitalist extractivism (Dunlap and Riquito p. 5). This green extractivism policy approach can then be defined as “an apparatus or structure of systematic extraction with clear objectives, ideologies, schedules, habits, and overall, repetitive patterns towards extracting and taking minerals, water, energetic and biological goods”. 

It is key to note that “86% of industrial mines for key metals around the world are located in areas of high or intermediate plant diversity”. Green extractivist policies therefore entail a high degree of environmental degradation, with the accompanying harm done to the existing social, cultural, and economic structures surrounding the affected ecosystems. As described above, mining activities have a huge impact on the ecosystems and societies it operates on. Calling mining “green” and “development”, is therefore a blatant illusion. 

While it is thus essential to tackle the climate crisis, and the fossil fuel industry as its main contributor, this cannot be done without a holistic approach. Framing the climate crisis as a mere problem of carbon emissions, and therefore labeling it as “green” any policy that contributes to diminish those is failing at considering the complex and multi-faceted character of this crisis. This climate reductionism completely jeopardizes other critical approaches to the problem that suggest a whole rethinking of our current global capitalistic functioning, such as post-development and degrowth trajectories and rethinking our relationship to Nature. Managing the climate crisis cannot mean driving up mining activities and a subsequent continued depletion of our ecosystems. 

The Tribunal will therefore hear the testimonials of representatives of affected communities and ecosystems, analyzing the impacts of the extractivism industry and identifying its perpetrators, through the lens of the inherent respect due to and application of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.

The same briefing states that “harm caused or contributed to by Canadian mining companies, their subsidiaries, and contractors overseas is widespread globally and persistent. It includes environmental degradation that will persist for hundreds of years, a wide range of human rights harms, abuses of Indigenous rights, as well as negative economic and financial impacts at local and national levels. Together, these impacts have serious and long-term repercussions on local and national development”. These impacts are largely documented on the MiningWatch Canada website and have also been the subject of reports in front of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. These include both human rights violations and violations of the Rights of Mother Earth, among which : 

The push towards a needed global energy transition away from fossil fuels is dangerously leading to an even more dangerous impact, a significant increase in mining activities, as the demand for minerals like lithium, cobalt, and copper grows to support renewable energy technologies. However, this rapid expansion comes at a high cost to Nature and those who defend it. Mining operations, often financed by Canadian capital, are spreading into some of the world’s most biodiverse regions, causing deforestation, water contamination, and the displacement of Indigenous communities. Nature Defenders face escalating threats, including violence and criminalization, for opposing these projects. While transitioning to clean energy is essential, it must not come at the expense of ecosystems and human rights.

This session builds on the 6th Rights of Nature Tribunal’s successful first hearing in New York during Climate Week 2024, themed “The End of the Fossil Fuel Era”, to emphasize that the fossil fuel and mining industries are interconnected components of the same destructive system and must be addressed collectively. Thus, the judgments from both sessions will be presented as part of a unified proposal: The “New Pact with Mother Earth”, at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025.