A report published by the Business & Human Rights Resource Center (BHRRC) on Wednesday accused Chinese companies of more than a hundred human rights and environmental abuses at the mines where China produces much of the world’s supply of “green energy” minerals, such as lithium, cobalt, copper, and various rare earths.
“Our data shows human rights and environmental abuse is prevalent in the exploration, extraction and processing of [green energy] transition minerals,” said the report authors, who remained anonymous because they were concerned about retaliation.
The BHRCC report found violations at Chinese mines across Asia and Africa, with the highest concentrations of abuse found in Indonesia, Peru, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Myanmar, and Zimbabwe. The worst abuses were inflicted at copper and nickel mines, which are found in abundance in those countries.
“Many projects invested in by Chinese companies are located in resource-rich host countries, which often have weak governance and limited options for victims of abuse to seek remedy. This is accompanied by an absence of legislation in China mandating extra-territorial human rights and environmental due diligence, leaving workers and communities vulnerable to harms,” the report noted.
“Over two-thirds of the allegations involve human rights abuses against local communities. The most salient risks concern impacts on livelihoods, Indigenous Peoples’ rights and insufficient or lack of consultation,” the report said.
A man gets a shave in a barbershop at night, close to the border crossing with Zimbabwe, in Kazangula, Zambia, on Sunday, May 8, 2022. A recent 1,900-mile journey from mines in Congo and Zambia shows how, a century after commercial mining began here, the worlds hunger for copper is again reshaping the region. (Zinyange Auntony/Bloomberg via Getty)
Over half of the abuses involved “negative environmental impacts,” including water pollution, destruction of wildlife habitats, and restricting access to water. Over a third of the allegations were about violations of workers’ rights, including “health and safety risks in the workplace.”
BHRCC noted that only seven of the 39 Chinese companies covered by its report have published policies for human rights.
The BHRCC, an international non-governmental organization (NGO) with executives based in London and New York, was all in favor of the worldwide forced transition to green energy, even though it makes the free world increasingly dependent upon the brutal Chinese Communist regime.
The BHRCC argued that a “just” mining industry would make the transition faster and more affordable, but the BHRCC report adds to the mountain of evidence that the opposite is true: environmental and human rights abuses are widespread in the China-dominated “green minerals” industry because the hasty transition plan requires vast quantities of vital ingredients like lithium and cobalt to be delivered quickly at very low prices.
“Given their vital role in energy sectors globally, Chinese actors are well placed to lead a responsible energy transition. However, this can only be achieved if Chinese businesses and regulators take proactive measures to address endemic human rights and environmental abuses linked to transition minerals,” the report said wistfully.
The authors did not explain how China – which denies the very existence of “human rights” as the West defines them, puts a great deal of effort into corrupting international human rights organizations, and is working to eradicate economic sanctions as an instrument of diplomacy – would be induced to take those “proactive measures.”
Antonia Timmerman of the China Global South Project told the UK Guardian on Wednesday that mining transition minerals is often “the defining project for China’s relationship” with countries like Indonesia, so those governments are unlikely to do anything that might antagonize Beijing or jeopardize the flow of Chinese investment.
“This is a dirty business,” Timmerman sighed, noting that governments like Indonesia “can be very brutal when it comes to defending and protecting” lucrative Chinese mining interests.
BHRCC suggested that “Western buyers like Tesla, Ford, and BMW” could be pressured into demanding more human rights and environmental accountability from China, but that notion is utterly laughable.
China treats the CEOs of these companies like royalty and they reciprocate by declaring their deep admiration for dictator Xi Jinping and his despotic government. No executive at an American electric vehicle (EV) company would dream of sacrificing his entire business model to pick a fight with China over forced labor or environmental degradation, not with a huge push in progress to dramatically increase the number of EVs on a very short timetable.
As the Guardian pointed out, China puts on a ridiculous sham of accountability by creating “grievance mechanisms” and “mediation schemes” for workers, but they have no enforcement powers. That sham is good enough for Western EV manufacturers and media organizations that are fully committed to the “green energy transition.”
“Experts have warned that the global dash for transition minerals needed for green-energy technologies threatens to provoke a new wave of land-grabs, water shortages, environmental damage and community conflicts as countries rush to meet their climate-action goals with little thought about the collateral damage,” the Guardian said, glumly noting that American, Canadian, Australian, and European mining companies have also been accused of such abuses.
BHRCC’s Director of Regional Programs Betty Yolanda told the Associated Press (AP) that even the appalling situation described by the new report is just the “tip of the iceberg,” because the investigators mainly relied upon publicly available documents, complaints, lawsuits, and media reports.
“It is most difficult to receive information from countries with very little civic freedom and from conflict zones,” she pointed out.
The allegations made in the BHRCC report are not new. For example, the far-left New York Times (NYT) reported in November 2022 that “red flags for forced labor” were popping up all over the supply chain for Chinese EV batteries.
The NYT explained that China processes the metals for about three-quarters of the lithium-ion batteries manufactured for the entire world, and its domestic mining practices are as appalling as the rapacious operations in the Third World documented by BHRCC. The Chinese government denies all allegations of abuse and makes it clear that no attempt to alter its behavior through media, diplomatic, or economic pressure will be tolerated.
In December 2022, Harvard professor Siddharth Kara exposed the hideous labor and environmental abuses at Chinese cobalt mines in the DRC. The public-relations illusion created by the EV industry is of high-tech mining operations, but Kara found the reality of the cobalt mines is barefoot men, women, and children chipping away at rocks with picks.
“They dig in absolutely subhuman, gut-wrenching conditions for a dollar a day, feeding cobalt up the supply chain into all the phones, all the tablets, and especially electric cars,” Kara said, railing against Western Big Tech and EV companies for doing nothing to halt these practices because they are utterly dependent upon Chinese minerals for their batteries.
China opened a new $300 million lithium processing plant in Zimbabwe on Wednesday, tightening its grip on the green energy industry by digging into some of the world’s largest known reserves of lithium.
The opening ceremony was attended by Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who said he was determined to make his country “an emerging and competitive player in the global lithium value chain.”
Zimbabwe followed the lead of the countries most sternly criticized in the BHRCC report, like Indonesia, by banning the export of raw lithium ore. That means Zimbabwe’s vast potential lithium output will largely be processed by Chinese companies operating in another Third World nation where human rights and environmental scrutiny is not encouraged.