North Mara settlement a positive step, but justice has not yet been achieved

In March 2013 proceedings were brought in the High Court of England and Wales by the leading law firm Leigh Day against African Barrick Gold (ABG; now Acacia Mining) and its 100% owned subsidiary, North Mara Gold Mine (NMGML) on behalf of a group of Tanzanian villagers. The claim was that ABG and its subsidiary were liable, through complicity, for killing and injuring of locals at the North Mara mine by police guarding the mine. The companies denied the allegations. They contend that the police used reasonable force against armed and violent intruders and that they have no control over the police. On 6 February 2015 the parties reached an out-of court settlement, as reported in the UK newspaper The Guardian.

The claimants – believed to include the relatives of six men who were killed and four men who were shot and injured, one of whom was left paraplegic – have had to overcome a number of obstacles in their pursuit for just compensation. In July 2013, for example, ABG and NMGML tried to get a Tanzanian court to declare that they could not be liable. According to Leigh Day, ‘This was a pre-emptive legal strike by this very powerful company to try and obtain an unfair advantage over our clients.’[1] In August 2013 Leigh Day successfully applied for an anti-suit injunction restraining ABG and NMGML from taking the legal action forward in Tanzania on the grounds that the case was to be heard in a UK court. In 2013, in an apparent response to the threat of litigation, the company hastily put in place a grievance mechanism to deal with alleged cases of human rights abuses. In order to receive compensation, victims had to sign a controversial legal waiver preventing them from suing Barrick or any of its subsidiaries in any jurisdiction for the harm they have suffered. Many of Leigh Day’s original clients were persuaded to sign up to the programme without the benefit of having their lawyers present.

The North Mara settlement will be of substantial material benefit to the claimants concerned, but wider questions about alleged human rights violations at the mine remain unanswered. No one has been brought to justice for the abuses and those victims who were not included in the settlement will be unable to benefit from the more generous compensation offered to those who persevered with the claim.

The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights provide for company-level grievance mechanisms as a means of overcoming the many practical and procedural barriers that prevent victims for having access to an effective remedy. At the UN Forum on Business and Human Right in December 2014, RAID and Mining Watch organised a panel discussion highlighting some of the problems with company grievance mechanisms and distributed a briefing paper: ‘Privatized Remedy and Human Rights: Re-thinking Project-Level Grievance Mechanisms’. The paper is a critique of the grievance mechanisms at the Porgera Joint Venture Gold Mine in Papua New Guinea and the North Mara, Tanzania.