The settlement with 13 Indigenous Mayan Guatemalan plaintiffs resolves over a decade of litigation
After more than a decade of litigation, Canadian mining company Hudbay Minerals Inc. has settled three lawsuits with 13 Indigenous Mayan Guatemalans who accused the company’s security personnel of human rights abuses, including attacks, sexual assault, and murder.
The parties have agreed not to disclose the settlement amount or other terms of the agreement, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said in a statement Monday. All 13 plaintiffs, who are members of Guatemala’s Q’eqchi’ community, will be compensated.
“At the beginning of this journey, the plaintiffs were not sure that they would get any justice for what happened to them, either in Guatemala or in Canada,” Murray Klippenstein, a sole practitioner and one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, said in a statement Monday. “The plaintiffs pursued justice in Ontario against a transnational Canadian corporation and ultimately obtained a fair and reasonable settlement.
“We think that corporate executives and investors alike may want to take note,” Klippenstein added.
Candace Brûlé, Hudbay’s vice president of investor relations, told Canadian Lawyer in a statement, “We are pleased to have reached a mutually agreed settlement on lawsuits relating to alleged events at a former Hudbay asset in Guatemala. These cases have been ongoing for more than ten years, and the parties have continued to have fundamentally differing views on the facts underlying the allegations.
“In one of the lawsuits, the allegations are against a Guatemalan company that owned the project prior to Hudbay. In 2011, Hudbay divested its holdings in the Guatemala project,” Brûlé said.
“We are thankful that this settlement finally brings these matters to a close, and we note the settlement was reached without any admission of liability.”
The incidents alleged in the three lawsuits occurred in Guatemala in 2007 and 2009. In one of the lawsuits, eleven plaintiffs said they were gang-raped by mine company security personnel in 2007 when they were forcibly evicted from their village of Lote Ocho. The village was located on land occupied by the Fenix mine site, which Hudbay did not acquire until 2008.
In the second lawsuit, Angelica Choc alleged that mine security personnel killed her husband and Indigenous community leader Adolfo Ich, who opposed the reopening of the Fenix mine.
The third lawsuit, brought by German Chub Choc, alleged that security personnel shot and paralyzed in an unprovoked attack in the same series of events that resulted in Adolfo Ich’s death.
In 2021, a Guatemalan court found the former head of security at the Fenix mine guilty of homicide for Ich’s death. The court also found guilty on three counts of culpable injury for his role in Chub’s attack.
Penelope Simons, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa whose research focuses on transnational business activity, told Canadian Lawyer on Monday that the lawsuits are part of a group of key cases that have helped undermine transnational corporations' advantage when facing lawsuits involving their operations outside Canada.
Two other cases in this vein are Garcia v. Tahoe Resources in British Columbia and Nevsun Resources Ltd. v. Araya, which the Supreme Court of Canada decided in 2020.
These types of lawsuits are “very difficult to bring when all the evidence is in another country, the plaintiffs are from another country, everything happened in another country, and you're bringing it against the Canadian company in Canadian court,” Simons says. “There are significant obstacles that plaintiffs face.
“There’s a series of pre-trial motions, for example, that these companies are able to bring in order to get the case dismissed before it's heard on its merits,” Simons adds. ‘So up until this case, most of the cases had been dismissed for jurisdictional reasons or on other grounds, but summarily dismissed.”
The lawsuits against Hudbay Minerals Inc. were notable because while they never went to trial, the company eventually decided not to challenge the allegations on forum non conveniens grounds.
Simons notes that the plaintiffs alleged that a novel duty of care “exists between a Canadian mining company and individuals who suffer harm perpetrated by security personnel in the host state, where the parent company had direct control over those operations.” The Ontario Superior Court of Justice agreed with the plaintiffs.
“It is important that a court has said that we have a case where [the plaintiffs have] done enough to demonstrate… there was this novel duty of care,” Simons says.
