Pitfalls and Pipelines - Philippine Indigenous Peoples Links

252 Pitfalls and Pipelines: Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Industries
bility of its 2007 ruling to all “the Maya villages in the Toledo
Districts,” which is home to approximately 14,000 Mopan and
Q’eqchi speaking Mayan people. 4
The proposed Tampakan mine in the Philippines is an
example of a community challenging national laws governing
the extractive industries. The local indigenous peoples,
the La Bugal B’laan, filed a case in 1997 against the type of
project mining lease, called a Financial or Technical Assistance
Agreement. This was the first of the leases to be granted under
the new 1995 Mining Act, and it allowed for 100 percent foreign
ownership of the mine. The key argument was that this
was unconstitutional, as Article 22 of the Constitution called
for 60 percent Filipino ownership of foreign joint ventures.
Initially, in January 2004, the Supreme Court found in favor
of the B’laan. By the end of the year, however, allegedly under
political pressure, the Supreme Court reversed its own decision.
Although they finally lost, the community did much to
expose how little the state, or community, got from this type
of mining lease. Anyway, the project is currently stalled on
another legal technicality, which is a provincial ban on openpit
mining. 5
2.6.2 Regional Human Rights Mechanisms
As noted above, if a community wants to pursue legal
strategies at the international level, the next option is likely to
be elevating the case to a regional human rights system. There
are, however, some caveats. The first is that although there are
courts at regional level, as these are linked into implementing
human rights, there can be a problem with implementation at
national level, even where states have signed onto the relevant
human rights instrument. In many ways they are similar to
some of the human rights complaints mechanisms reviewed
in the Chapter 2.7.
The level of protection afforded by these bodies is mixed as
well. The Inter-American Court and Commission on Human
Rights (IACHR) has led the way in progressive decisions,