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Folks file suit vs mining companies, DENR execs

By atm.admin - Posted on June 25th, 2010


ILIGAN CITY (MindaNews) — Around 200 residents of Barangay Anislagan in Placer town, Surigao del Norte today marched to court in Surigao City to file a case that an environment watchdog said would put to test case the New Rules of Procedure for Environmental Cases.

The villagers, organized as the Anislagan Bantay Kalikasan Task Force Inc. (Abakataf), filed an injunction ‘mandamus’ class suit against Manila Mining Corp. (MMC), Kalayaan Copper Gold Resources (KCGR), Silangan Mindanao Mining, Inc. (SMMC) and the regional office of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and some of its top officials.

Bringing streamers bearing slogans that assert their right to water as well as to protect their farmlands and environment, the villagers went to court assisted by lawyers known for their long-time opposition to mining.

In a statement, Carl Cesar Rebuta, project development officer of the Legal Rights and Natural Resource Center (LRC/KSK), said that the case is the first of its kind to be filed after the Supreme Court created environment courts.

In their 14-page complaint, Abakataf alleged that “DENR 13 granted mining operation permits to MMC to explore the mineral-rich Anislagan without even a proper legal consultation with the residents in the area.”

“DENR gave exploration permits to these mining companies despite strong opposition from the communities since September of year 2000,” the complaint added.

 

Rebuta said MMC is a subsidiary of the Lepanto Group of Companies, a large mining firm issued with two exploration permits (EPs XIII-014 and XIII-014A) by the DENR-Caraga.
 
He said DENR 13 also granted exploration permits to KCGR and Silangan Mining.
 
“KCGR is a joint venture of MMC and Anglo American, a British mining company,” he added.
Abakataf expressed fears the mining activities will affect their farms and will have an adverse impact on Anislagan’s forest areas and water sources.

 

LRC-KsK lawyers noted that despite opposition from the local government units and their constituents the DENR’s Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) issued MMC a temporary exploration permit on Dec. 29, 2000.

In 2001, the municipal council of Placer passed an ordinance that would protect the watershed and communal forest in the whole municipality of Placer. Anislagan also approved a barangay resolution

declaring its watershed as a protected area, Rebuta pointed out.

“With the New Rules of Procedure for Environmental Cases, the Anislagan farmers hope that the court will finally act on their prayer to put a stop to the mining activities in their area,” he said.

 http://www.mindanaotimes.net/?p=9746

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COMMENT RULES:

Hi everyone,

I'm the national coordinator of Alyansa Tigil Mina (ATM), the owner of this site.

We will always respect views and opinions posted on this site, as much as we encourage open discussion and intelligent debate on the issue of mining. ATM has its stand on this issue very clearly, and we welcome the comments from those who do not agree with us.

However, we have observed that in the past few days, this forum has gone way beyond acceptable behavior of netiquette.

I will request and strongly encourage all posters to at least follow the following rules:

1. Be civil. Basic courtesy and privacy norms should be practised by posters in this forum. Make your mom at least proud by showing you still remember to be polite, even if you're not required to say "po" or "opo" in every post you make. We wouldn't mind that either, if you do so. Then again, I am assuming here that you're already an adult.

2. Personal attacks will not be tolerated. This also applies to flaming. Just in case you don't know what flaming is, its deliberately insulting or personally ranting against a poster (or a thread) simply because you are losing the arguments.

3. Avoid being anonymous. Since you have enough time to post long comments, you would at least have a few seconds to type even an alias. You also help people conclude that you are not a paid hack from a PR firm by Intex (or any other mining company)

4. Do not shout in the forums. Do not use ALL CAPS in your posts. A single exclamation point should also suffice.

We will observe the forum in the next few days. Should these rules be disregarded, we will transform this into a minimally-moderated forum. We hope we will avoid the situation that we will decide to make this a closely and strictly moderated forum. We value everyone's insights so much.

We'll check up again on this new rules after a short while. Of course, we expect the Intex ECC to be revoked in a few days. In this case, I suspect that the "excitement" in this thread would have died down.

Jaybee Garganera
National Coordinator
ATM
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