Rohitesh Dhawan, President and CEO, ICMM.
Pierre Gratton, President and CEO, MAC.
Michèle Brülhart, Executive Director, Copper Mark.
David Tait, CEO, World Gold Council.
Re: Civil society elevates concerns over the Consolidated Mining Standard Initiative and the risk it will drive a race to the bottom by the mining industry at the expense of communities
Dear Mr. Dhawan, Mr. Gratton, Ms. Brülhart, and Mr. Tait,
In September 2023, our network of community organizations, labor unions, and Indigenous, environmental, and human rights groups wrote expressing our concerns over your efforts to create a new mining audit and certification standard through the Consolidated Mining Standard Initiative.
One year later, we are even more doubtful that the Initiative will develop a rigorous standard with meaningful participation from mining affected communities, workers, labor unions, and nongovernmental organizations, that holds companies accountable to a high level of social and environmental performance.
People and the environment suffer when companies are left to self-regulate with weak voluntary standards. Voluntary standards and certification schemes, regardless of their strength, will never be a substitute for mandatory legal frameworks, accompanied by strong enforcement capacity.
We recognize that strong voluntary standards can help drive improved mining industry human rights and environmental performance if they have the level of transparency and rigor necessary to provide credible information and require companies to continuously improve based on independent audit findings.
Strong voluntary standards that support such progress contain the following minimum criteria – noting that mining companies must be accountable for compliance with these requirements, and not just States or other entities:
1. A multistakeholder co-governance model with equal decision-making which gives equal power to rights holders, NGOs and workers through co-creation of the system at the outset and ongoing equal governance;
2. Clear-cut, full protection of Indigenous Peoples and their rights, including the right to self-determination and the right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), as put forward in UNDRIP, for which mining companies and States are both accountable;
3. Evaluation of mining operations based on robust standards with comprehensive, detailed criteria based on best practices for upholding Indigenous Peoples’ rights, labor rights, worker health and safety, and human rights; ensuring responsible environmental safeguards to protect water, land, ecosystems, biodiversity, wildlife and health; and securing financial guarantees for safety, closure and reclamation;
4. A design that fosters and maintains continuous progress, disclosure, and transparency of activities by participating companies;
5. Strong mechanisms to ensure audit robustness and credibility, including requirements for on-the-ground audits, independence of audit firms, financial separation between audit firm and mining company, auditor training, public publication of detailed audit results, quality audits with sufficient time to interview workers and rights holders, encouraging their participation through independent outreach by the auditors, and time-bound corrective action plans based on audit results that are informed by rights holders; and 6. Robust, accessible and safe grievance mechanisms for rights holders to report and remedy harm, and for those to be managed independently.
There are existing standards, notably IRMA, that meet many of these criteria.
The participating schemes in the Consolidated Mining Standard Initiative have so far failed to meet many of these criteria. Notably, it is not co-created between business and rights holders. Instead, it merges existing schemes, developed and led by industry, where evaluations have repeatedly demonstrated an absence of multistakeholder shared co-governance, divergences in assessment quality, and dearth of transparency (See studies from Lead the Charge, Germanwatch, and Mercedes Benz).
The mining industry designing the system, standard and accountability mechanisms to evaluate its own social and environmental performance undermines the credibility of the Initiative.
In your response to our September 2023 letter, you acknowledged that this approach ‘results in an inherent asymmetry.’ The proposed ongoing consultation of Industry and Stakeholder Advisory Groups—which organizations from civil society, labor and private sector have exited over legitimacy concerns—and public comment opportunities on the draft Standard are insufficient to address this fundamental misalignment.
Moreover, assurances that the Standard will drive a much needed race to the top by companies and promises that the Standard will have multi-stakeholder governance have not been backed by recent activities.
Notably, ICMM’s process to revise its Indigenous Peoples & Mining Position has been contested by Indigenous leaders and allies for lacking transparency, conducting insufficient consultations with Indigenous Peoples, and not meaningfully integrating feedback gathered through consultation with Indigenous Peoples and other stakeholders.
The final position reflects such exclusion. The Securing Rights in the Green Economy, or SIRGE Coalition has strongly critiqued the final position as a “deeply flawed position [that] allows the continuation of harm to Indigenous Peoples by mining operations and calls into question ICMM’s stated commitment to respecting Indigenous Peoples’ rights.”
Because the majority of all energy transition minerals globally (sometimes called critical minerals) are located on or near the lands of Indigenous and other land-connected Peoples, Indigenous Peoples will be disproportionately impacted by the Consolidated Standard under development.
The weakening of ICMM’s Indigenous Peoples & Mining Position demonstrates a negligence and deeply concerning lack of commitment by ICMM— and Copper Mark, World Gold Council and MAC’s Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) by association as Consolidated partners—to center the needs of rights holders in its expectations of member companies.
We believe this process to be deeply problematic and are concerned that it runs the risk of creating a race to the bottom at a time when the mining sector so urgently needs to make significant improvements to its social and environmental performance. We request your organizations and those associated with the process to evaluate whether the Consolidated Standard effort is fit for purpose as a system that drives improvements in more responsible mining practices.
We request a response from your groups on the content of this letter and welcome the opportunity for dialogue on the serious concerns raised in it.
Signed,
Batani Foundation
Business and Human Rights Resource Centre
Center for Science in Public Participation
Climate Rights International
Earthworks
Friends of the Earth US
Geology in the Public Interest
Global Witness
Great Basin Resource Watch
Human Rights Watch
Imperial Valley Equity and Justice Coalition
IndustriALL Global Union
Jubilee Australia Research Centre
Lead the Charge
Malach Consulting
Mennonite Central Committee U.S.
Mighty Earth
Public Citizen
Publish What You Pay (PWYP)
Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID)
Securing Indigenous Rights in the Green Economy (SIRGE) Coalition
Sierra Club
Society for Threatened Peoples, Switzerland
The Revolving Door Project
The Sunrise Project
Transport & Environment (T&E)