Human Rights Watch (HRW) welcomes the opportunity to provide information to the Special Rapporteur to inform her upcoming report to the United Nations General Assembly in its eightieth session.
This submission focuses on several significant challenges concerning the frameworks, processes and implementation of environmental impact assessments (EIAs), as documented through a selection of HRW's research and advocacy on environmental issues dating from 2012 to 2025. The findings summarized in this brief demonstrate that flawed EIA processes undermine human rights protections, including the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. After briefly summarizing its research findings, HRW respectfully offers recommendations for tackling these challenges and strengthening EIA frameworks.
Lacking independence, impartiality and quality
HRW research has identified how, in many countries, EIA frameworks are undermined by political or economic pressures. Governments may pre-approve or fast-track projects even when EIAs are of poor quality, treating the EIA as a mere formality to be cleared swiftly.
For example, in a 2012 report, HRW documented that India's government systemically failed to ensure that the country's 2,600 authorized mining operations adhered to human rights and environmental protections under Indian law. HRW found that the EIAs the government used to determine whether to award mine permits, which were paid for by the mining company seeking a permit, were often extremely inaccurate, deliberately falsified, or both. Nevertheless, mining projects were almost never denied environmental clearance.
In 2016, the Zambian government's environmental agency approved an EIA by a British company. The EIA proposed to process the lead-contaminated mine waste at a former, defunct mine in the city of Kabwe, at significant risk to human health and the environment. Two independent experts consulted by HRW found that the EIA for these plans did not adequately address serious risks.
Research on mining in Guinea in 2018 similarly found that the government's approval of poor quality EIAs, lacking analysis of key environmental and social risks, led to tangible impacts on communities' land, water, and air quality. The government agencies overseeing mine permits prioritized perceived economic benefits over detailed analysis of environmental and social risks by fast-tracking permits.
In 2023, HRW documented that the Maldives government undertook poorly designed land reclamation projects (creating new land by removing sand and coral from the ocean floor) that buried mangroves and dredged lagoons without proper community consultation, leading to worsening flooding, loss of livelihoods (fisheries, agriculture), and increased climate vulnerability. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Maldives' primary environmental regulatory authority, ostensibly has oversight of development projects, but it lacks independent enforcement authority, and thus operates under the minister of environment, technology and climate change. An EPA official described the situation as "a conflict of interest," saying "given that the number one developer is the government, it becomes very difficult for us to regulate the government while being part of the government." Although EIAs were legally required, in practice the process had been politicized, rushed and sidelined, as many projects were pre-approved by the government, rendering any EIA irrelevant. After the EIA is done, said a former environmental official, the Environment Ministry rejects "most of the recommendations made in an EIA." Moreover, EIA consultancy firms bidding on government projects are in competition to show they can complete their assessments quickly.
Recommendations:
- EIAs should be conducted and reviewed in a manner that ensures high quality standards, independence and impartiality, including through independent oversight. When done by public authorities, states should ensure that EIAs are not determined by the same entity seeking and authorizing an environmental permit.
- EIAs should determine risks and impacts objectively, considering the best available science, Indigenous knowledge, and human rights standards in assessing environmental impacts of policies, activities and projects. To this effect, states need to guarantee independence and impartiality for those carrying out impact assessments, including through effective protections against external pressures and conflicts of interest.
Limited scope
If EIAs focus solely on potential environmental impacts, they risk ignoring the multiple ways in which environmental degradation causes or contributes to concurring human rights violations. For example, in 2016, HRW reported that Malawi's government failed to protect the rights and livelihoods of people living in nascent mining communities. Families living near coal and uranium mining operations faced serious problems with water, food, and housing, and were left in the dark about health and other risks from mining. Although impact assessments were required by Malawi's regulatory framework for all projects that potentially affect the environment and community health, the law regarding EIAs for mining operations was unclear and incomplete, as it did not require an assessment of social impacts from mining.
Neglecting the cumulative effects of project expansions often fails to capture how multiple projects can create or worsen environmental harm and human rights violations. The United States has one of the most regulated fossil fuel and petrochemical industries in the world, but regulations have been insufficient and poorly enforced. In its 2024 investigation of the destructive health impacts of the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry over the residents of Cancer Alley, Louisiana, HRW found that extreme pollution contributed to elevated rates and risks of maternal, reproductive, and newborn health harms, cancer, and respiratory ailments. Yet expansion is underway with at least 19 new fossil fuel and petrochemical plants planned for Cancer Alley, including within many of the same predominantly Black and poor communities. HRW recommended the local government deny permits for fossil fuel and petrochemical operations that would result in a disproportionate burden of harm in already overburdened communities.
In 2024, HRW determined that over four decades, successive Turkish governments have built and expanded two of the country's biggest coal power plants, plants A and B, in Afşin-Elbistan. HRW found that air pollution levels near plant A - and the later-built plant B two kilometers away - are dangerously high and that residents are experiencing health conditions that academic studies have attributed to air pollution from the plants. Despite this, Turkish authorities were presented with an EIA that gave the go-ahead for the expansion of plant A, which is estimated to lead to about 1,900 premature deaths over its 30-year economic lifespan. HRW found the EIA failed to meet national and international legal standards including lack of adequate assessment of existing air quality standards, failure to precisely integrate key air pollution data in air quality assessments, unclear standards in assessing cumulative impacts, and failure to uphold participation rights. In 2025, authorities approved the Afşin-Elbistan plant's expansion.
Recommendations:
- Human rights risks need to be holistically assessed either through their integration in the scope of EIAs or under separate and rigorous human rights impact assessments.
- When located in or near communities that already experience disproportionate environmental and health harms and risks, EIAs need to consider the cumulative impacts of projects on these already overburdened communities.
Insufficient public participation
When Indigenous peoples and affected communities are not genuinely consulted, the EIA process fails to protect human rights by negating public participation in environmental matters, and risks creating or perpetuating human rights violations.
In a 2024 report, HRW reported on violations of Chong Indigenous people's rights in Cambodia's Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project, a major carbon offsetting project in Cambodia. HRW found that such initiatives can also harm Indigenous people when communities' effective participation and consent are not ensured. HRW underscored that EIA's for carbon offsetting projects should require mapping of customary rights in partnership with local communities to avoid encroaching on Indigenous territories that have not yet been legally recognized. The REDD+ project conducted activities for 31 months before beginning to consult the Chong communities in August 2017. During that period the Cambodian Environment Ministry and Wildlife Alliance made crucial decisions on the management of the designated land without the Indigenous Chong people's free, prior, and informed consent. They incorporated eight Chong villages into a national park, undermining their rights over their customary land and forests.
In 2025, HRW recommended the US rescind the permits of the Thacker Pass lithium mine, which was authorized by the government without obtaining the free, prior, and informed consent of Indigenous peoples. The 18,000-acre mining project is under construction and will extract lithium from one of the world's largest known deposits. While the mine is not displacing any communities, the construction work has prevented Numu/Nuwu and Newe Indigenous peoples from accessing parts of Peehee Mu'huh, the Indigenous name for land in the area. Access to the land is important for religious and cultural practices. Tribal residents also expressed fears that the mine threatens their rights to health, a healthy environment, and water.
For mining occurring beyond Indigenous peoples' reservation and trust land boundaries, like at Peehee Mu'huh, US law provides only limited requirements for federal agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management, to consult impacted Tribes. A great deal of discretion is afforded to the agency in determining which Tribes to consult. There is no effort required, or made to reconcile, the often-imperfect overlap between affected Indigenous peoples and Tribal identities and structures. The agency also has a great deal of discretion to determine what "consultation" entails. The Environmental Impact Statement compiled by the US government for the Thacker Pass mine, and the underlying impact assessments compiled by Lithium Americas, the company developing the mine, did not meaningfully assess whether Indigenous peoples were informed of, and consented to, the project.
Recommendations:
- EIAs should allow people to express their views as part of the meaningful consideration of a specific project. EIAs should aim to place public participation, equitable and informed views of all involved stakeholders, including affected communities, at the core of the decision-making process of development projects.
- Indigenous peoples, who have the right to free, prior and informed consent, need to be consulted at every stage of the assessment, including during the conceptualization and design of the planned activity.
Lack of transparency
Access to information on environmental risks and impacts due to a proposed activity or project is a key component of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. HRW has researched numerous situations in which governments, companies and development banks do not identify or disclose the risks of their activities.
In 2019, HRW documented the responsibility of four European development banks for abusive practices on oil palm plantations in the Democratic Republic of Congo. These banks - BIO, from Belgium; CDC Group, from the United Kingdom; DEG, from Germany; and FMO, from the Netherlands - are among the 10 largest bilateral development financial institutions in the world. HRW found that the banks failed to ensure that the palm oil companies they financed in Congo (Feronia and its subsidiary Plantations et Huileries du Congo S.A. - PHC) were respecting the basic rights of the people who work and live on or near their plantations.
These banks had not disclosed their due diligence assessments, nor the mitigation measures they agreed the company would implement, on grounds of commercial secrecy. So long as they shield this information, it is difficult - if not impossible - to effectively monitor whether they are meeting their human rights responsibilities. This is particularly concerning for investments that are deemed "high risk" under the IFC environmental and social categorization, as PHC has been classified by FMO, because of their "potential significant adverse environmental or social risks and/or impacts that are diverse, irreversible, or unprecedented." Disclosing such assessments would not be unusual - the IFC and World Bank publish social and environmental impact assessments, or their equivalent, for all their projects.
In Zambia, a 2025 Human Rights Watch report found that companies mining, removing, and processing lead-contaminated waste from the former Kabwe mine have not disclosed whether they submitted EIAs, whether these EIAs were approved by the government, or what was the content of these EIAs. The Zambian environmental authority has not published EIAs of these companies either, though it has a dedicated webpage for their publication. Companies also did not disclose human rights risks identified in their operations.
Recommendations:
- EIAs need to be transparent: the results need to be made easily and readily available to the public, especially to potentially affected communities, in a timely and accessible manner. Governments, businesses, conservation organizations, international financial institutions, and development banks need to publicize EIAs undertaken in the scope of their activities, ensuring that information about potential environmental and associated human rights risks, including health impacts, are available to the public.
- Impact assessments, can be disseminated in different ways, including by providing short summaries in non-technical language, translating reports and summaries in local languages, posting them on the internet and holding information sessions in directly affected communities.
Lack of adequate enforcement
Despite strong regulations on identifying, assessing and mitigating environment and human rights impacts, governments and businesses have ignored their obligations to carry out EIAs.
In a 2021 report, HRW documented that the Lower Sesan 2 dam - a Chinese-financed hydroelectric dam in northeastern Cambodia - flooded large areas upstream of the confluence of the Sesan and Srepok Rivers. The dam, completed in 2018, undermined the lives and livelihoods of thousands of Indigenous and ethnic minority people. The governments and companies involved in the project were aware of the harm that would likely result from the dam before it even began. A 2008 EIA commissioned by one of the project partners, EVN, pointed to the main problems: large numbers of people displaced to areas with inferior farmland; serious and permanent effects on their fishing and farming incomes; major negative effects on the livelihoods of other fishing communities upstream and downstream; and losses to other areas toward the Vietnam border and downstream toward the Mekong River, with an estimated 300,000 people "indirectly impacted." The Cambodian government, however, after undertaking only perfunctory consultations with local communities facing eviction and deprivation of their livelihoods and culture, approved the project in 2012.
Despite a legal framework establishing the duty to carry out EIAs, Cambodia systematically failed to conduct EIAs or do them in a timely and meaningful or participatory manner in most large-scale projects. The Ministry of Environment reported in 2012 that between 2004 and 2011, only 110 out of nearly 2,000 development projects had conducted an EIA. When carried out, EIAs in Cambodia were often conducted too late in the development process of projects to mitigate risks during the planning stage and prevent incorrect estimations of adverse social and environmental impacts. In this regard, HRW recommended the government to fully enforce existing laws and decrees, including relevant provisions in Cambodian law that require development and investment projects to undergo the scrutiny of EIAs.
Recommendation:
- Government agencies need to be equipped with adequate resources and authority to monitor compliance with all environmental regulations, including EIAs, and put into place and enforce sanctions for non-compliance, such as suspending projects that fail to meet EIA requirements.
