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EarthRights develops precedent-setting litigation and advances novel legal strategies.

Corporate Accountability

We expose environmental destruction, climate harms, and human rights abuses; challenging conduct, repairing harm, and preventing future abuses.
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EarthRights ensures that fossil fuel companies take responsibility for their role in the climate crisis by representing local governments, shifting financial burdens away from communities, and promoting stronger oversight.
Indigenous Rights

We partner with Indigenous communities and networks, especially across Latin America and Southeast Asia, to uphold territorial stewardship, defend their rights to self-determination, and demand meaningful state action.
Environmental Defenders

EarthRights provides training, legal defense, and helps create and strengthen regional and international networks for defenders.

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La Fiscalía Provincial se abstuvo de impugnar la sentencia de segunda instancia que confirmaba la inocencia de todas las y los comuneros de Urinsaya.

Alcalde de Pasco demanda a minera Volcan para exigir justicia ambiental por contaminación en Cerro de Pasco

New Mexico’s Regulator Sued for Failure to Hold Oil and Gas Companies Accountable for Well Cleanup

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For over 30 years, we have been the nonprofit legal organization at the forefront of holding powerful corporations accountable for human rights and environmental abuses worldwide and to shift power back to the communities they harm.

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Line 3: Tara Houska, Winona LaDuke, AhnaCole Chapman, and Switchboard Trainers Network v. County of Hubbard, Corwin Aukes, and Mark Lohmeier

Status: Closed

Issues: Climate Justice & Accountability, Corporate Accountability, EarthRights Defenders

Header Photo credit: Giniw Collective SUMMARY This case seeks to vindicate the rights of Indigenous water protectors and their allies in northern Minnesota who have faced unlawful and discriminatory policing and abuses in response to their constitutionally-protected opposition to the construction of Enbridge Inc.’s new Line 3 pipeline. The proposed new pipeline would extend approximately…
La Nación U’wa contra el Estado colombiano

Status: Ongoing

Issues: EarthRights Defenders

Desde principios de los años noventa el pueblo indígena U’wa, ubicado en el noreste de Colombia, ha luchado para proteger su territorio ancestral resistiendo las amenazas derivadas de las actividades turísticas, petroleras y mineras que ponen en riesgo su existencia física y cultural. En diciembre de 2024, la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos declaró, por…
U’wa Indigenous People v. Colombia

Status: Ongoing

Issues: EarthRights Defenders

Introduction Since the early 1990s, the U’wa Indigenous people from northeastern Colombia have fought to protect their ancestral territory. They have resisted threats from tourism, oil, and mining industries that endanger their physical and cultural survival. In December 2024, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that the Colombian State was responsible for violating the…
Budha Ismail Jam, et al v. IFC

Status: Closed

Issues: Corporate Accountability, EarthRights Defenders

SUMMARY Fishing communities and farmers are taking on the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the arm of the World Bank Group that finances projects by private corporations, for its role in funding and enabling the destructive Tata Mundra Ultra Mega coal-fired power plant in Gujarat, India. In 2015, plaintiffs sued the IFC in federal court in…
Maxima Acuña-Atalaya v. Newmont Mining Corp.

Status: Closed

Issues: Corporate Accountability, EarthRights Defenders

SUMMARY The Chaupe family, including Goldman Environmental Prize winner Máxima Acuña-Atalaya de Chaupe, are subsistence farmers in the rural highlands of Cajamarca, Peru. They obtained the right to a plot of land known as Tragadero Grande in 1994, and have cultivated crops and raised livestock there for many years. Since 2011, when Newmont’s Board of…