Ms Gabriela Quijano:

I hope everyone can hear me well. I thank the committee for giving us this opportunity to discuss this important matter. I also want to say hola a Ramona y Quelvin. Les doy la bienvenida a Europa. Es un gusto escucharlos.

I wish to refer to a typical case of wrong-doing. I will use the example of a mining company because those were the examples that Mr. Jiménez Villalta and Ms Domingo Díaz raised and from which they suffer particularly in their territories. I have been a human rights lawyer and advocate on human rights for more than 20 years, 14 of which were with Amnesty International in its business and human rights team. Because of the nature of our work, we focused on countries all over the world so what I will say here is typical of Guatemala but it is also typical of pretty much any developing country - any global south country - in the world. One of the learnings I was shocked about initially - I no longer am - is how the pattern of abuse and the model of behaviour is so similar across the entire globe. I will set out what those abuses might look like.

First, local communities and indigenous peoples are given no information about plans to develop projects on their land, despite their right to determine how they want to live their lives and how they want to vet the notion of development and despite having rights over their territories and resources. They have no initial information. They are not consulted about the plans. Typically, they only get to know about a plan for a project being developed – we are talking about enormous infrastructure projects and enormous mining operations, so these are not minor projects - when they see the machines operating on the ground or when they see drilling for exploration purposes. Their right to information or participation in decision-making related to plans and projects that might affect their right to consultation and, for indigenous peoples, their right to free planning consent has already been violated at this point, when the company has not yet set foot there or its physical presence is still very small.

Once they start operating, and there has already been an infringement of rights, the company wants to patch things up. That is when it starts to build a farce of a consultation process. It might, or might not, try to rein in the local council or local politicians to support them in setting up something that looks like a consultation when we know this is already way too late. Even those consultation processes are typically highly defective. They are not done according to international law. There is plenty of guidance and standards about what an appropriate consultation looks like. This is how projects are imposed on indigenous people’s lands and on local communities’ lands. There is a lot of manipulation. It can be one-to-one manipulation. Typically, companies do not want to address issues with people as a collective. They do not want to meet with community representatives or communities as a whole. They like to try to strike a deal resident by resident. Perhaps the deal is about buying the land or gaining access to the land. When they do it one-to-one, they do not disclose information to other people as they go on doing their negotiations one-to-one. Typically, communities realise that one third of community members have already been approached and potentially lured into giving up their land or giving access to their land.

That is another breach of the rights of indigenous peoples, whose rights are held as a community or group.

Environmental and social impact assessments are typically requested and required in these projects but they are also highly defective. They are used mostly as a rubber stamp and not as a genuine tool to identify and prevent risks, and never to decide a project should not actually go ahead because the environmental and social impacts are too great. Under international standards, environmental and social impact assessments should be made in consultation with rights holders, but they hardly ever are. Typically, they are shared with rights holders only at the end of the process. Typically, they are 3,000-page technical documents that neither the rights holders nor anybody else can understand. They often cannot be read because they are in English or Spanish, which is often not the indigenous people’s language. In any case, even if they could read them, they would not understand them because the documents are highly technical and often produced in that manner for that purpose.