Takeaways: IIPWG February 2025
Items excerpted from the February 2025 Investors & Indigenous Peoples Working Group (IIPWG) Newsletter. IIPWG strategy calls take place the third Thursday of the month. Learn more.
FPIC Violations in Thacker Pass Mine Permitting
A report by Human Rights Watch and the ACLU outlines the cultural significance of Thacker Pass to the Numu/Nuwu and Newe Peoples and how the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and companies violated FPIC during the permitting, planning, and ongoing development of the Thacker Pass lithium mine.
According to the report, “The entirety of the BLM’s direct contact with Tribes during the EIS process was nine mailings in total—three rounds of mailings sent to three Tribal government offices, to which BLM received no reply.” The government approved the mining permit in less than a year. Though BLM complied with legal requirements for Tribal consultation, U.S. laws fall short of international standards on Indigenous Peoples’ rights and FPIC. Ancestral lands are now inaccessible to the Numu/Nuwu and Newe Peoples.
The report recommends that Lithium Americas [NYSE: LAC] and Lithium Nevada [OTCMKTS: NVLHF], among other actions, cease operations, ensure land is restituted to Indigenous communities, obtain FPIC for new permits, and conduct an Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA) audit. The report also recommends that General Motors [NYSE: GM] ensure construction is paused until FPIC is respected.
Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Remains Lowest-Performing Metric For Automakers
The 2025 Auto Supply Chain Leaderboard report by Lead the Charge finds that rights violations and impacts to Indigenous Peoples remains automakers’ lowest performing metric for the third year running.
The comparative analysis assesses 88 metrics at 18 of the largest global automakers. The average corporate score for Indigenous Peoples’ rights increased from 4% in 2023 to 6% in 2024, but remains low compared to the 25% average corporate score for general human rights. The SIRGE Coalition emphasizes that, “Two-thirds of automakers made no progress year-over-year, and half had no policy to respect Indigenous Peoples’ rights.”
The findings indicate that no automaker “is yet demonstrating with concrete and complete evidence whether and if so, how, they are operationalizing their commitments on Indigenous Peoples’ rights throughout their supply chains.” The report urges automakers to improve their commitments to ethical supply chains by committing to the highest standard of Indigenous Peoples’ rights and by operationalizing and reporting on FPIC.
Banks Reference FPIC but Policy Implementation is Limited
The BankTrack Global Human Rights Benchmark 2024 report, which evaluates 50 of the largest global banks on human rights policies and due diligence processes, introduced new metrics that assess consideration for Indigenous Peoples’ right to FPIC and protection of human rights defenders.
Findings indicate that two-thirds of banks reference FPIC or UNDRIP at least once in a policy statement, but policy implementation is limited as no banks have “established processes to ensure that clients or investees provide evidence of having obtained FPIC.” Half of banks fail to show that they integrate meaningful consultation with rights holders into the risk identification process and more than 80% fail to mention human rights defenders at all in disclosures. Banks also provide little to no evidence of facilitating remedy.
Among recommended actions, BankTrack calls on companies to improve due diligence by integrating meaningful engagement with rights-holders, improve reporting transparency and quality by increasing disclosure of how adverse impacts are managed, and strengthen safeguards to protect the specific rights of Indigenous Peoples.