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Category: Pacific Rim/OceanaGold
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Published: Monday, 18 May 2015 14:36
Maude Barlow and Meera Karunananthan - Huffington Post
As the world looks for innovative solutions to solve the rapidly worsening water crisis, two Salvadoran experts are touring Canada this week to promote a simple strategy that could save the public billions of dollars.
Yanira Cortez, Deputy Attorney for the Environment for El Salvador's Human Rights Ombudsperson's Office and Marcos Gálvez, President of the Association for the Development of El Salvador are calling on Canadians to help solve the water crisis by challenging investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms that have enabled corporations to sue governments for hundreds of millions of dollars when policies aimed at protecting the environment threaten corporate profits.
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Category: Pacific Rim/OceanaGold
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Published: Monday, 18 May 2015 14:24
Rene Guerra - teleSUR
The company’s proposed gold mine would have used thousands of tons of cyanide and hundreds of thousand liters of water per day
In anticipation of an imminent ruling from the World Bank’s little known investor-state arbitration tribunal that could force El Salvador to pay Canadian mining firm OceanaGold US$301 million, a Salvadoran delegation is in Canada to discuss how this arbitration process threatens democratic decision making, public health and the environment here and beyond.
“As United Nations expert Alfred de Zayas recently expressed, the impact that investor-state arbitrations have already had and will have on human rights is very worrisome,” warned Yanira Cortez, Deputy Attorney for the Environment for El Salvador’s Human Rights Prosecutor’s Office, at an event in Ottawa this week. “We know that just the threat of these lawsuits can force governments in the Global South – and even here in Canada – to go against the public interest when it comes to health and environmental protections.”
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Category: Pacific Rim/OceanaGold
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Published: Wednesday, 13 May 2015 16:03
Sandra Cuffe: New Republic
Alejandro Guevara hasn’t slept. There was a death in La Maraña, and Guevara, the vice president of the community environmental association, spent the night at the wake. Still, he doesn’t skip a beat as he describes recent violence in his small Salvadoran village, running dates and names, his own included. Someone fired shots at Guevara’s home in October 2013. An anonymous person then called to his cell to ask whether anyone in the house had died.
Murders, threats, and attacks have followed the environmental activists who oppose a gold mining project in the Cabañas department in northern El Salvador. The list is a work in progress. On April 4, police harassed Santos Neftalí Ruíz, a priest and the president of the Cabañas Environmental Committee. READ MORE
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Category: Pacific Rim/OceanaGold
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Published: Wednesday, 13 May 2015 15:48
Toronto (Canada), May 12 (EFE Noticias) .- The Ombudsperson for the Defense of the Rights of Environment of El Salvador, Yanira Cortez, began a tour of Canada today to talk about the case of OceanaGold mining corporation which has sued the Central American country for 301 million dollars for denying an operating permit.
Cortez and Marcos Galvez, president of the Salvadoran NGO CRIPDES will visit Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto in the coming days for to seek support from Canadian social and trade union organizations against OceanaGold’s law suit.
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Category: Pacific Rim/OceanaGold
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Published: Saturday, 18 April 2015 14:03
Gabriel Labrador- Equal Times
The Central American state of El Salvador could be forced to pay US$301 million in damages to an Australian-Canadian mining company, OceanaGold, after the company’s application for a mining license was rejected on the basis of the projected environmental damage it would cause.
El Salvador is the most water-stressed country in the region. As a result, the government stopped granting mining licenses back in 2008 in an attempt to preserve the country’s limited clean water supplies and safeguard the environment.
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Category: Pacific Rim/OceanaGold
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Published: Friday, 17 April 2015 15:15
INTERNATIONAL TRADE UNION CONFEDERATION
Brussels, 15 April 2015 (ITUC OnLine): The ITUC has described a $300m claim against El Salvador by an Australian/Canadian mining conglomerate as an example of the worst excess of corporate greed. The claim is being decided in a tribunal under the tainted “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” (ISDS) procedure which corporations and some governments want to see incorporated into possible new trade agreements such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
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