Human Rights

Facebook shut down its eight year-old fact checking program this month provoking a slew of criticism that the social media giant was bowing to pressure from the incoming U.S. presidency of Donald Trump, who will take office on January 20. Read More

Some three quarters of the word’s supply of cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where children as young as 10 years old help extract the metal from hand dug shafts in the Tilwezembe mine in Katanga province. Read More

Empresa de Energía del Pacífico (EPSA) dumped over 30 years of accumulated sediment from the Anchicayá dam in western Colombia in July 2001, polluting the river, killing fish, destroying farmlands and mangroves. The Afro-Caribbean community downstream sued EPSA and finally won Col$203,962 million (US$52 million) in compensation in February 2024, after 20 years of court battles.  Read More

Glencore was given a permit to build a dredging waste dump site to serve the McArthur River Mine lead and zinc extraction operation in Australia’s Northern Territories. The regional government was sued by members of the Yanyuwa and Yanyuwa-Mara community (who hold Aboriginal title to the site) for failing to consult them. The High Court of Australia ruled in the community’s favor in February 2024. Read More

Climate activist Mike Smith, a Māori elder in Aotearoa (New Zealand), sued seven of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the country to publicly admit that they caused a public nuisance and dramatically scale back emissions to reach net zero by 2050. In February 2024, New Zealand’s Supreme Court ruled that his lawsuit should b Read More

Investigations by Greenpeace and Repórter Brasil found that close to half of mechanized diggers used for illegal gold mining in the Amazon are manufactured by HD Hyundai Construction Equipment. After extensive pressure from Indigenous and environ Read More

Twenty workers were killed in an explosion at Indonesia Tsingshan Stainless Steel smelter in Morowali Industrial Park on Sulawesi island in Indonesia last December, shining a spotlight on the safety problems that are rife in the production of one of the key raw materials for electric car batteries. Read More

Palm oil and rubber plantation company Socfin has been accused of land grabbing in Cambodia, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Activists targeted the Bolloré Group (Socfin’s second biggest shareholder) to demand change, resulting in the company being placed on a watchlist by Switzerland’s largest public pension funds. Read More

Timber giant Samling is one of the biggest logging companies on the island of Borneo in Malaysia. After SAVE Rivers, a local NGO, posted articles critical of the company’s lack of consultation with local Indigenous communities, the company sued for defamation in 2021. After two years of local and international pressure, Samling finally withdrew the US$1.05 million lawsuit. Read More

Private sector projects to solve the climate crisis have soared in the last decade: green energy options from British Gas and NextEra; Tesla electric cars; panels from JinkoSolar in China; and Siemens wind turbines in the North Sea. Yet how many truly mark a departure from business-as-usual by industry? Read More