Judicial Victory vs Montagne d’Or
FEBRUARY 15th 2019
Alluvial TROJAN HORSE & Russian-Canadian mega-corporation Nordgold
FIRST JUDICIAL VICTORY
FOR THE OPPONENTS OF MONTAGNE D'OR
More than a year after the appeal, the administrative judge sided with the petitioning association Maïouri Nature Guyane, partner of the Or de Question collective. The collective is glad for this first victory in the fight against the Montage d’Or project, its mothership the Nordgold company and industrial extractivism in French Guiana.
Editor’s note: In December 2017, Montagne d’Or, a gold mining project led by the Nordgold international corporation, was granted an exploitation permit for the alluvial gold of the Paul Isnard plot, by Prefectoral order. The associations Guyane Nature Environnement and Maiouri Nature Guyane lodged an appeal against this decision.
The cancelation of the Prefectoral order is based on at least two factors:
1- the court considered that the alluvial gold exploitation allowed on the order of French Guiana’s prefect and the industrial extraction program planned in the same area, known as “Montagne d’Or”, located very near to each other, are in fact constitutive of the same mining exploitation project. Hence, this resulted in a “salami slicing” of the impact assessment study.
2 - the court ruled that the Environmental Authority, embodied by an officer of the Direction of environment, planning and housing (DEAL, Direction de l’Environnement, de l’Aménagement et du Logement) in French Guiana, did not meet the required independence condition from the prefect of French Guiana, who signed the contested order.
Read the press release of the Administrative Court of Cayenne and the integral ruling (in French)
Read the press release of the Or de Question Collective (in French)
Two articles from Guyaweb also decipher this ruling: (in French)
L'Autorité Environnementale de la DEAL jugée illégitime. (15 fev.2019)
et un article juridique de F. Farine (12 Fev. 2019)
Or de Question condemns, once again, the misinformation attempt in the press release of the Montagne d’Or Org. (in French), that wrongly claims our appeal “forced the Guianese company Atenor to cease its activities”.
It is a lie and exposed as such in a correspondence from the Prefecture, available here (in French), where one reads that the Atenor company has ceased its activities since July 2017, for strictly financial reasons: the mining field of Boeuf-Mort was not profitable, “the results obtained across the whole exploitation period were drastically below the economic threshold of the alluvial resource”.
To understand this matter more accurately, we remember the words of the sub-contracting artisan of the Montagne d’Or Org., previous to his settlement on the Boeuf-Mort exploitation field: “CMO has this industrial mining project (editor’s note: called Montagne d’Or). Mining rights are valid for a certain amount of time, and theirs ends with the year 2018 (1). To renew the mining titles, it is required to prove that there are mining resources and it is for this reason that CMO resorted to me, to produce alluvial gold, superficial gold, to justify this presence of gold so they can continue with their project”, explains Antoine Léveillé.
Extract from the interview of Antoine Léveillé, titled: “There is no correlation between the AOTM Boeuf-Mort and the Montagne d’Or project” (sic.)
- Guyaweb du 26 juil 2017 (In French)
(1) : The artisan here refers to a prolongation request for the exploitation of the mining field for 25 additional years, that would be granted to the Russian-Canadian international corporation Nordgold. This request has been subjected to a Public Consultation in December 2018, the decision is still pending in the offices of the Ministry of Economy. Or de Question, WWF Guyane and Sauvons la Forêt (Save the Forest) produced and submitted more than 10 000 individual contributions against this absurd prolongation. The 30 of june 2019, a Tribune about this was published in the Parisien newpaper.
This judicial victory has been well covered by several media, such as Radio Fréquence TERRE, the Human Rights League, Actu-Environnement, the Figaro, the Monde, l'Express, in Canada, by legal experts and lawyers’ think tanks and even on BFMtv...
