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WTO ruling against India’s solar push threatens climate, clean energy

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“The U.S. should be applauding India’s efforts to scale up solar energy—not turning to the WTO to strike the program down.”

India's ambitious solar program was rebuked by the WTO in a decision that climate advocates say shows the potential damage of deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. (Photo: Knut-Erik Helle/flickr/cc)

India’s ambitious solar program was rebuked by the WTO in a decision that climate advocates say shows the potential damage of deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. (Photo: Knut-Erik Helle/flickr/cc)

by Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams

The World Trade Organization (WTO) on Wednesday ruled against India over its national solar energy program in a case brought by the U.S. government, sparking outrage from labor and environmental advocates.

As power demands grow in India, the country’s government put forth a plan to create 100,000 megawatts of energy from solar cells and modules, and included incentives to domestic manufacturers to use locally-developed equipment.

According to Indian news outlets, the WTO ruled that India had discriminated against American manufacturers by providing such incentives, which violates global trade rules, and struck down those policies—siding with the U.S. government in a case that the Sierra Club said demonstrates the environmentally and economically destructive power of pro-corporate deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

“Today, we have more evidence of how free trade rules threaten the clean energy economy and undermine action to tackle the climate crisis,” Ilana Solomon, director of the Sierra Club’s Responsible Trade Program, said on Thursday. “The U.S. should be applauding India’s efforts to scale up solar energy—not turning to the WTO to strike the program down.”

According to Indian media outlet Livemint, the U.S. government

has resorted to similar measures, specifying local content requirements and offering a range of subsidies for promoting its renewable energy sector at the federal, state, regional and local levels.

India spoke repeatedly against the US at WTO’s committee on subsidies and countervailing measures, stating that American subsidy schemes relating to local or domestic content requirements for its solar companies are inconsistent with its global trade obligations.

In addition, Livemint reports, the ruling “goes against the spirit of an agreement signed early this year…. [in which] the two sides agreed to promote clean energy and expand solar energy initiatives.”

Regardless, Solomon said, the WTO “needs to get out of the business of hampering climate action in countries around the globe. The outdated trade rules on the books now and under negotiation in trade pacts including the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership encourage trade in fossil fuels and discourage countries from developing local clean energy capacity.”

“These rules simply do not reflect the urgency of solving the climate crisis and stand in the way of clean energy growth,” Solomon said.

The Indian government will appeal the decision to the WTO’s highest court, the appellate body. It is the second time that the WTO has ruled against India in a case with the U.S., which first brought legal action against the country’s food security program in 2014.

The WTO ruled on that case in June, when it decided that the Indian ban on certain foods from the U.S. was “inconsistent with the global norms.”

California oil spill clean-up could take months

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Workers clean up an oil slick along the coast of Refugio State Beach in Goleta, California, United States, May 21, 2015. | Photo: Reuters

Workers clean up an oil slick along the coast of Refugio State Beach in Goleta, California, United States, May 21, 2015. | Photo: Reuters

by teleSUR

The spill, which some estimate to be the largest in 46 years to hit the Santa Barbara shoreline, created a nine-mile slick along Refugio State Beach.

Cleaning up oil from a burst pipeline leaked onto iconic California beaches and the surrounding ocean could take months, a U.S. Coast Guard captain said Thursday.

“It’s a long process,” said Coast Guard Captain Jennifer Williams, federal on-scene coordinator of the spill response. “These types of things continue on, perhaps for months, to make sure the environment is restored to its original condition.”

California Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency Wednesday after almost 2,500 barrels of crude petroleum spilled onto two state beaches and into the Pacific the previous day when the Plains All American Pipeline was damaged.

The spill, which some estimate to be the largest in 46 years to hit the Santa Barbara shoreline, created a nine-mile slick along Refugio State Beach stretching 50 yards out into the water, leading environmentalists to fear for the damage to marine life.

The Environmental Defense Center condemned the spill and pointed the finger at Plains for failings that allowed it to occur.

“There continues to be a number of questions … including why there was no automatic shut-off on this relatively new pipeline, and why the early response was not more successful in halting the flow,” the group’s head Owen Bailey said.

“This region is home to an incredible diversity of wildlife, including numerous species of endangered whales and iconic coastlands that bring people from across the world to visit.”

Ruptured pipeline along California Coast dumps 21,000 gallons of Crude Oil into Pacific Ocean

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‘To see this level of spill into such a sensitive and treasured environment is devastating to watch. These waters are known as the Galapagos of North America with numerous species of endangered whales migrating through marine protected areas and off the iconic and beloved Gaviota Coast.’

Campers try to rescue an oil-covered bird on Refugio beach. It later swam back into the ocean. (Photo: Noozhawk/Lara Ann Cooper)

Campers try to rescue an oil-covered bird on Refugio beach. It later swam back into the ocean. (Photo: Noozhawk/Lara Ann Cooper)

by Jon Queally, Common Dreams

An oil pipeline that runs along the coast of central California broke on Tuesday, according to officials, dumping tens of thousands of gallons of crude onto local beaches and creating a 4-mile slick in the Pacific Ocean.

Initial estimates put the spill at about 21,000 gallons Tuesday, but the Associated Press cited a U.S. Coast Guard spokesperson on Wednesday who said that figure is likely to change after a Wednesday morning flyover gave a better sense of the spill’s scope.

The pipeline, which runs parallel to Highway 101 near Santa Barbara, left a slick extending about four miles (6.4 km) along Refugio State Beach, extending about 50 yards into the water, explained Petty Officer Andrea Anderson of the USGC.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

The rupture, located along an 11-mile long underground pipe that’s part of a larger oil transport network bound for Kern County, was first reported about noon after a woman at Refugio State Beach in Goleta smelled the crude’s noxious fumes. Coast Guard crews stopped the leak by 3 p.m., said Coast Guard Petty Officer Andrea Anderson.

It’s unclear what caused the break in the pipeline.

After flowing from the pipeline, crude pooled in a culvert before spilling into the Pacific, where it created a four-mile-long sheen extending about 50 yards into the water. Officials said winds could send the oil another four miles south toward Isla Vista.

The pipeline, built in 1991 and designed to carry about 150,000 barrels of oil per day, is owned by Houston-based Plains All American Pipeline, which said in a statement that it shut down the pipe. The culvert was also blocked to prevent more oil from flowing into the ocean, the company said.

By late Tuesday, a thick layer of crude had begun to wash ashore, with black tar smearing the rocks as the brackish tides arrived.

“It is horrible,” said Brett Connors, 35, a producer from Santa Monica who said he spotted sea lions swimming in the oil slick. “You want to jump in there and save them.”

Local affiliate 23 ABC KERO News offered this raw footage of the coastal areas impacted by the spill:

The location of Tuesday’s disaster is not far from the infamous Santa Barbara spill in 1969, the worst of its kind in U.S. history up to that point, which is widely credited with jump-starting the nation’s modern environmental movement which took off in the 1970s.

In response to Tuesday’s spill, Owen Bailey, executive director of the Santa Barbara-based Environmental Defense Center, said his group was closely monitoring the situation both onshore and off, but expressed little surprise that an accident occured with the pipeline.

“Unfortunately with accidents and oil development, it is not a question of if, but of when,” Bailey said. “To see this level of spill into such a sensitive and treasured environment is devastating to watch. These waters are known as the Galapagos of North America with numerous species of endangered whales migrating through marine protected areas and off the iconic and beloved Gaviota Coast.”

Looking both backward and into the future, Bailey decried the fossil fuel industry as he praised the work of locals groups who have long demanded an energy shift away from oil and gas. “In the wake of the terrible 1969 Santa Barbra oil spill, our communities have fought for many years to protect this as one of the most important environments in all of California,” he said. “Looking forward at new, risky  coastal drilling applications from Venoco to drill off Ellwood and Sunset/Exxon to drill from Vandenberg Air Force Base, this is an important reminder that we must redouble our efforts to make safer, cleaner and forward-looking decisions on energy production.”

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Despite climate change rhetoric, Gates Foundation invests $1.4 Billion in fossil fuels: Report

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Largest charitable foundation in world target of growing call for divestment

Melinda and Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2009. (Photo: World Economic Forum/flickr/cc)

Melinda and Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2009. (Photo: World Economic Forum/flickr/cc)

by Sarah Lazare, Common Dreams

Despite the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s position that global warming poses an immediate and serious threat, the charity holds at least $1.4 billion of investments in the fossil fuel companies driving the climate crisis, sparking accusations of hypocrisy from green campaigners.

The holdings were revealed Thursday by Guardian reporters Damian Carrington and Karl Mathiesen, who analyzed the organization’s most recent tax filings in 2013.

The foundation invests in some of the biggest—and most infamous—fossil fuel giants in the world, including: BP, Anadarko Petroleum, and Vale.

The largest charitable foundation in the world, the organization says its investments are controlled by a separate entity, the Asset Trust. However, climate campaigners do not buy this abdication of responsibility, and the organization has, in the past, caved to public pressure to divest from companies that violate human rights, including Israeli prison contractor G4S.

The Guardian launched a campaign on Monday calling on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as the Wellcome Trust, to “remove their investments from the top 200 fossil fuel companies and any commingled funds that include fossil fuel public equities and corporate bonds within five years.”

The effort has already been backed by 95,000 people, the outlet reports.

The campaign is part of a global push for fossil fuel divestment, as a strategy to deligitimize and de-fund the industries driving global warming. In response to such efforts, over 200 institutions have already committed to divest, from colleges and universities to the World Council of Churches and the British Medical Association. Ongoing campaigns are picking up momentum across world, with universities from South Africa to New Zealand to the Netherlands key battlegrounds.

“Divestment is about aligning our investments with our values and challenging the political power of an industry that is threatening indigenous peoples, polluting our politics and driving us toward climate catastrophe,” Adam Zuckerman, environmental and human rights campaigner for Amazon Watch, told Common Dreams.

This movement is accompanied by a growing call for reinvestment in the people most impacted by climate change.

“Divested capital should go to frontline communities who are building the next economy,”declared Our Power, a campaign that unites Indigenous peoples, people of color, and working-class white communities collaborating through the Climate Justice Alliance. “When combined with power building, moving the money becomes a tool to truly remake economy, not just create alternatives that sit at the fringes of the extractive economy.”

The call for divestment is growing increasingly mainstream, with the United Nations lending its backing to the cause.

Meanwhile, the scientific community continues to sound the alarm.

A study published earlier this year in the journal Nature in January found that, in order to stave off climate disaster, the majority of fossil fuel deposits on the planet—including 92 percent of U.S. coal, all Arctic oil and gas, and a majority of Canadian tar sands—must stay “in the ground.”

Last year, the world pumped out more carbon pollution than ever before

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by Brian Merchant, Motherboard

Precisely at the moment that the climate depends on carbon pollution declining, worldwide emissions continue to boom. Case in point: 2013 saw yet another record carbon high, with 35.3 billion tons of CO2 entering the atmosphere.

That’s the finding of ​the European Union’s​ Joint Research Center, which released its annual report on global emissions today. The document tallies the emissions of fossil fuel power production—coal, oil, and gas—and emissions from industry, especially cement and metal manufacturing.

The record high was reached primarily thanks to developing, coal-hungry giants: “Sharp risers include Brazil (+ 6.2 percent), India (+ 4.4 percent), China (+ 4.2 percent) and Indonesia (+2.3 percent),” the report notes.

The US—the world’s largest historic greenhouse gas emitter—grew again after a brief pause, thanks to a return to coal.

“The emissions increase in the United States in 2013 (+2.5 percent) was mainly due to a shift in power production from gas back to coal together with an increase in gas consumption due to a higher demand for space heating.”

The silver lining is that the rate of emissions growth is at least slowing: “emissions increased at a notably slower rate (2 percent) than on average in the last ten years (3.8 percent per year since 2003, excluding the credit crunch years),” the report adds. China’s emissions are plateauing, after its economy’s mega-boom that began in the early 2000s has begun to level off. The EU’s emissions have continue to decline, slowly.

The report also notes that there’s a ‘decoupling’ underway, wherein GDP is growing even when carbon emissions slow (the two have historically been intrinsically linked). That’s because the globe is shifting to embrace a bigger service economy, and relying a bit less on industrial production.

Sadly, that’s not happening nearly fast enough. According to scientists who have estimated our global carbon budget, ​we have a​pproximately 1,200 gigatons of carbon left to burn before we see levels of warning that may be altogether destabilizing to human civilization—2˚C or 3.7˚F worth of temperature rise. Last year, we ate through 37 gigatons of said budget.

The fact that we’re still shattering carbon production records in the face of global calamity—after 2˚C of warming, scientists worry about ​’runaway’ effects like methane feedbac​k loops—is disquieting. The fact that our international treaty process is woefully toothless and has taken decades to make the tiniest baby step, is further cause for worry.

Unless the international community can quell its thirst for coal and oil, and help developing economies grow with clean power sources, we’re heading for more sea level rise, more drought, and melting poles.

It’s one record we need to stop breaking.

Dangerous levels of Global Warming are unavoidable, says the World Bank

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by Laura Dattaro, Vice News

Global temperatures will rise nearly 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels by the middle of the century regardless of actions taken to curb emissions, according to a report from the World Bank released Sunday. The rising temperatures are already disproportionately affecting developing countries and the world’s poorest citizens.

Current energy demands mean the world is committed to emitting more greenhouse gases, which will stay in the atmosphere for decades. That means that even with “very ambitious mitigation action,” the report states, temperatures will continue to rise past the 0.8 degrees Celsius increase already seen today.

“That’s a big message,” Samantha Smith, head of climate for the WWF, told VICE News. “Globally, what all countries have agreed to is that they’re going to keep warming under two degrees Celsius. This report is telling us that 1.5 degrees is too much for a lot of people.”

In the three areas examined in the new report — Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, and the Western Balkans and Central Asia — climate change will lead to reduced crop yields and worsened drought, bringing threats to water supplies. In Brazil, soybean crop yields could decrease by as much as 70 percent, and wheat by as much as 50 percent, if temperatures increase two degrees by 2050. Jordan, Egypt, and Libya could see crop yields decrease by 30 percent.

In Russia, melting permafrost and tree death in boreal forests are releasing stored methane and carbon, adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. A similar pattern is being seen in the Amazon rainforest, which absorbs 20 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted from the burning of fossil fuels, according to the environmental organization Amazon Watch. A two degree increase could wipe out 90 percent of coral reefs, devastating coastal ecosystems and the economies and fisheries that depend on them.

“When we talk to policy makers, they seem to be able to pivot and think extreme weather events are not affecting us right now,” Sasanka Thilakasiri, policy advisor for Oxfam International, told VICE News. “To me, the report is important in just sort of saying these impacts are happening now, and we’re on a path to having them even more exacerbated if we don’t do anything.”

The report, which was authored by researchers at The Potsdam Institute, a German climate research center, linked recent extreme heat in the observed regions to climate change with 80 percent certainty.

The report comes at a busy moment for climate change negotiations — just one week before a United Nations climate conference in Peru and two weeks after the United States and China, the two largest emitters, announced a joint agreement on emissions reductions. President Obama committed the United States to cutting emissions 26-28 percent by 2025 compared to 2005 levels, while China’s president Xi Jinping said his country’s emissions would peak “around 2030.”

‘This is a problem for both rich and poor.’

Last week, 30 nations pledged $9.3 billion over the next four years to the Green Climate Fund, designed to help developing nations reduce emissions and adapt to the consequences of climate change caused largely by the actions of richer nations. The United States pledged $3 billion. At the fund’s inception, it was envisioned to provide $100 billion a year by 2020.

“This is a problem for both rich and poor,” Thilakasiri told VICE News. “It’s in everyone’s best interest that we can provide the financing that’s needed to move the global economy away from our carbon habit.”

The World Bank hasn’t invested any funds in coal use in the last five years but it did not make a commitment to divesting entirely from fossil fuel exploration and technology development.

“We cannot ask these energy-poor countries to wait until there are ways of, for example, ensuring that solar and wind power can provide the kind of base load that all countries need in order to industrialize,” Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, said. “We believe very strongly that the poorest countries have a right to energy. And all of the fossil fuel burning, for example, in Africa, would not contribute any significant amount to the overall carbon that’s in the air.”

While the World Bank’s overall investments in fossil fuels have decreased since 2008, the organization spent $1 billion financing fossil fuel exploration in 2013, according to Oil Change International

“That, from our perspective, is a problem, because it is exactly these kinds of projects that are burning the stuff that’s causing climate change,” WWF’s Smith told VICE News. “When it comes to developed countries shouldering their weight, we’re seeing some political signals, but they’re very far from being strong enough or fast enough or at the scale that we need to really do something.”

Four die, one injured in chemical leak at Texas plant

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Workers exposed to methyl mercaptan, chemical used in insecticides

Four workers died and one was injured in a chemical leak at a DuPont factory in Texas on Saturday. (Photo: Health Gauge/flickr/cc)

Four workers died and one was injured in a chemical leak at a DuPont factory in Texas on Saturday. (Photo: Health Gauge/flickr/cc)

by Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams

Four workers were killed and one injured in a chemical leak at a DuPont plant near Houston, Texas on Saturday.

A valve began leaking methyl mercaptan, a chemical used to make insecticides and fungicides, around 4am at a plant stationed in La Porte, about 20 miles east of Houston. Officials say the leak was contained by 6am, but the five employees who were in the unit at the time responded to the accident and were exposed to the chemical. The cause was not immediately known.

Methyl mercaptan is also often used to add odor to natural gas, which has no smell, for safety purposes.

According to the Houston Chronicle, among the victims were 39-year-old Robert Tisnado and his 48-year-old brother Gibby Tisnado, who had worked at the plant for six years. USA Today also wrote that the leak killed a supervisor who had been with DuPont for more than 40 years.

The Chronicle continued:

The chemical can cause severe respiratory, skin and eye irritation. It can also cause headaches, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, coma and even death. Exposure in poorly ventilated, enclosed, or low-lying areas can result in asphyxiation, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry….

Antonio Areola, 50, who works at the complex for another company, said the news was extremely sad. Plant workers are haunted by the potential dangers of the job, he said.

“There’s danger in the plants, you can always feel it,” he said in Spanish.

The Associated Press reports:

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board, a federal agency that investigates chemical accidents, announced late Saturday that it was sending a seven-person team to investigate the incident.

Jeff Suggs, emergency management coordinator for La Porte, said the chemical release was not toxic for those living nearby, but that it caused a smell that’s similar to rotten eggs.

“It’s a nuisance smell in the area. It’s a smell that’s traveled quite far,” Suggs said.

The odor from the leak lingered in the area for the better part of the day and reached areas about 40 miles away, The Houston Chronicle reported.

This is not the first time in recent years that DuPont workers have been killed by overlooked safety hazards in the company’s factories around the country. As NBC News writes:

The Chemical Safety Board in 2011 found “a series of preventable safety shortcomings” at a DuPont facility in Belle, West Virginia, contributed to a 2010 phosgene gas release that killed one worker. Also in 2010, an explosion during welding at a DuPont plant outside of Buffalo, N.Y., killed one worker. The board blamed the company’s failure to monitor flammable gas levels in a storage tank before welding for that accident.

Plant manager Randall Clements said in a statement, “There are no words to fully express the loss we feel or the concern and sympathy we extend to the families of the employees and their co-workers. We are in close touch with them and providing them every measure of support and assistance at this time.”

He added that DuPont will cooperate with officials investigating the cause of the accident.

Canada accused of failing to prevent overseas mining abuses

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Residents of Tapachula, Mexico protest mining by Canada's Goldcorp. (Photo: Movimiento Mesoamericano Contra Modelo Minero/cc/flickr)

Residents of Tapachula, Mexico protest mining by Canada’s Goldcorp. (Photo: Movimiento Mesoamericano Contra Modelo Minero/cc/flickr)

by Carey L. Biron, IPS News

The Canadian government is failing either to investigate or to hold the country’s massive extractives sector accountable for rights abuses committed in Latin American countries, according to petitioners who testified here Tuesday before an international tribunal.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) also heard concerns that the Canadian government is not making the country’s legal system available to victims of these abuses.

“Canada has been committed to a voluntary framework of corporate social responsibility, but this does not provide any remedy for people who have been harmed by Canadian mining operations,” Jen Moore, the coordinator of the Latin America programme at MiningWatch Canada, a watchdog group, told IPS.

“We’re looking for access to the courts but also for the Canadian state to take preventive measures to avoid these problems in the first place – for instance, an independent office that would have the power to investigate allegations of abuse in other countries.”

Moore and others who testified before the commission formally submitted a report detailing the concerns of almost 30 NGOs. Civil society groups have been pushing the Canadian government to ensure greater accountability for this activity for years, Moore says, and that work has been buttressed by similar recommendations from both a parliamentary commission, in 2005, and the United Nations.

“Nothing new has taken place over the past decade … The Canadian government has refused to implement the recommendations,” Moore says.

“The state’s response to date has been to firmly reinforce this voluntary framework that doesn’t work – and that’s what we heard from them again during this hearing. There was no substantial response to the fact that there are all sorts of cases falling through the cracks.”

Canada, which has one of the largest mining sectors in the world, is estimated to have some 1,500 projects in Latin America – more than 40 percent of the mining companies operating in the region. According to the new report, and these overseas operations receive “a high degree” of active support from the Canadian government.

“We’re aware of a great deal of conflict,” Shin Imai, a lawyer with the Justice and Corporate Accountability Project, a Canadian civil society initiative, said Tuesday. “Our preliminary count shows that at least 50 people have been killed and some 300 wounded in connection with mining conflicts involving Canadian companies in recent years, for which there has been little to no accountability.”

These allegations include deaths, injuries, rapes and other abuses attributed to security personnel working for Canadian mining companies. They also include policy-related problems related to long-term environmental damage, illegal community displacement and subverting democratic processes.

Home state accountability

The Washington-based IACHR, a part of the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS), is one of the world’s oldest multilateral rights bodies, and has looked at concerns around Canadian mining in Latin America before.

Yet this week’s hearing marked the first time the commission has waded into the highly contentious issue of “home state” accountability – that is, whether companies can be prosecuted at home for their actions abroad.

“This hearing was cutting-edge. Although the IACHR has been one of the most important allies of human rights violations’ victims in Latin America, it’s a little bit prudent when it faces new topics or new legal challenges,” Katya Salazar, executive director of the Due Process of Law Foundation, a Washington-based legal advocacy group, told IPS.

“And talking about the responsibility for the home country of corporations working in Latin America is a very new challenge. So we’re very happy to see how the commission’s understanding and concern about these topics have evolved.”
Home state accountability has become progressively more vexed as industries and supply chains have quickly globalised. Today, companies based in rich countries, with relatively stronger legal systems, are increasingly operating in developing countries, often under weaker regulatory regimes.

The extractives sector has been a key example of this, and over the past two decades it has experienced one of the highest levels of conflict with local communities of any industry. For advocates, part of the problem is a current vagueness around the issue of the “extraterritorial” reach of domestic law.

“Far too often, extractive companies have double-standards in how they behave at home versus abroad,” Alex Blair, a press officer with the extractives programme at Oxfam America, a humanitarian and advocacy group, told IPS. “They think they can take advantage of weaknesses in local laws, oversight and institutions to operate however they want in developing countries.”

Blair notes a growing trend of local and indigenous communities going abroad to hold foreign companies accountable. Yet these efforts remain extraordinarily complex and costly, even as legal avenues in many Western countries continue to be constricted.

Transcending the legalistic

At this week’s hearing, the Canadian government maintained that it was on firm legal ground, stating that it has “one of the world’s strongest legal and regulatory frameworks towards its extractives industries”.

In 2009, Canada formulated a voluntary corporate responsibility strategy for the country’s international extractives sector. The country also has two non-judicial mechanisms that can hear grievances arising from overseas extractives projects, though neither of these can investigate allegations, issue rulings or impose punitive measures.

These actions notwithstanding, the Canadian response to the petitioners concerns was to argue that local grievances should be heard in local court and that, in most cases, Canada is not legally obligated to pursue accountability for companies’ activities overseas.

“With respect to these corporations’ activities outside Canada, the fact of their incorporation within Canada is clearly not a sufficient connection to Canada to engage Canada’s obligations under the American Declaration,” Dana Cryderman, Canada’s alternate permanent representative to the OAS, told the commission, referring to the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, the document that underpins the IACHR’s work.

Cryderman continued: “[H]ost countries in Latin America offer domestic legal and regulatory avenues through which the claims being referenced by the requesters can and should be addressed.”

Yet this rationale clearly frustrated some of the IACHR’s commissioners, including the body’s current president, Rose-Marie Antoine.

“Despite the assurances of Canada there’s good policy, we at the commission continue to see a number of very, very serious human rights violations occurring in the region as a result of certain countries, and Canada being one of the main ones … so we’re seeing the deficiencies of those policies,” Antoine said following the Canadian delegation’s presentation.

“On the one hand, Canada says, ‘Yes, we are responsible and wish to promote human rights.’ But on the other hand, it’s a hands-off approach … We have to move beyond the legalistic if we’re really concerned about human rights.”

Antoine noted the commission was currently working on a report on the impact of natural resources extraction on indigenous communities. She announced, for the first time, that the report would include a chapter on what she referred to as the “very ticklish issue of extraterritoriality”.

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