ACTIVITY
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Energy Crisis: Human Rights in the Dark

Mining, oil or gas. For impoverished countries, having natural resources is not a synonym to wealth; it can though become quite the opposite.

Not only oil dependence and mining tend to reduce economic growth rates but they also stress income disparities among different population strata.

The extractive industries have a decisive role in the origin of many armed conflicts and tense situations worldwide today. Thus, countries, which are rich in these resources, suffer human rights violations, repression and persecution if any opposition or activity contrary to prevailing models of exploitation of raw materials is to be found.

La Plataforma de Seguimiento de las Industrias Extractivas (PSIE) -mining, oil and gas- comprises many entities in Catalonia and the rest of Spain. This platform has organized its strategies around the problematic issues of extractive industries.

Check the web of the Platform here 

Goals

The platform aims to monitor the socio-environmental conflicts and try to influence business practices and the responsibility of international corporations.

Actions carried out:

• Financial transparency of the oil industry
• Recognition and abolition of the ecological debt generated
• Spreading good environmental practices worldwide
• Support to the civil population: protection of the environmental activists and reporting of individual and community cases
• Monitoring of public investments that support the internationalization of Spanish investments abroad in the field of extractive industries-mining, oil and gas
• Research on the respect for Human Rights in the extractive industry

Article The paradox of wealth: natural resources and poverty
Miquel Carrillo, Engineers Without Borders
Read here (Spanish version only)

Series of lectures: Leire Urkidi and Marta Sahores talk about socio-environmental conflicts that gold mining has caused in Argentina and Chile (Barcelona, 3 October 2007).

More videos in the EWB multimedia space

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