The Amerindian community of Isseneru has petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) asking for the application of measures to uphold its rights over both titled and traditionally-owned lands, in light of ongoing concerns about mining claims and what it calls the failure of the authorities to protect its rights.
“We decided to send this petition to the Commission after we had exhausted all domestic remedies and after we had found that the State had failed to offer us protection in relation to our basic human rights,” said Dwight Larson, the secretary for the Region Seven village council, at a press conference on Thursday. “Even before we took this petition to the Inter-American Commission, we had sought government intervention and we had made public the problems we had been encountering. These problems are documented in the petition and include, among others, the loss of our ancestral land to mining interests, pollution of our water ways, mercury contamination through mining, and health and social problems,” he added.
Larson referred to a court ruling in January “where a miner was given rights to the land over us, even though we