"Mining and the Rights of Nature: An Inter-American Approach"

On November 16th, the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights and the Inter-American Association for the Defense of the Environment (AIDA) hosted the webinar “Mining and the Rights of Nature: An Inter-American Approach". This event was free to the public and in Spanish.

Javier Dávalos served as moderator, along with guest presenters Hugo Echeverría, Ándres Ángel, Paola Ortiz Jaramillo, and Carla Luzuriaga Salinas.

The Ecuadorian Constitution has served as a thoughtful framework for this webinar to create a dialogue of knowledge. This event was an opportunity to broaden the knowledge we have about the constitutional protection of the rights of nature, particularly of fragile ecosystems and threatened species, as well as of the communities that depend on them, in the face of high-impact anthropic activities such as mining.

Our speakers conversed about the constitutional conception to address activities such as mining and its impact on the rights of nature, as well as the difficulties to guarantee these rights in technical legal procedures (such as Environmental Impact Studies) that potentially affect them. This event analyzed the issue with an inter-American approach, which includes the Advisory Opinion of the Inter-American Court on the environment and human rights. A recording of this immersive web event is available for viewing here.