Will U.K. based multinational mining corporation Rio Tinto Ltd be stripped of its status as a human rights leader following its destruction of an Aboriginal sacred site showing evidence of 46,000 years of human habitation?

"The fact that nearly half of the companies assessed (49%) score 0 across all indicators related to the process of human rights due diligence is particularly alarming. These indicators focus on the specific systems the company has in place to ensure that due diligence processes are implemented to assess the real-time risks to human rights that the company poses, to act on these findings so as to prevent and mitigate the impacts, and to track and communicate those actions. Human rights due diligence is a fundamental expectation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). The three companies that top the 2019 ranking (Adidas, Rio Tinto and Unilever) all score full points on the human rights due diligence indicators...Eleven [of the 56 extractive] companies score above 50%, with Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, Freeport McMoRan and Repsol in the highest scoring band of 70-80%" [Corporate Human Rights Benchmark 2019 Key Findings]

The New York Times, 8 July 2020:

MELBOURNE — Aboriginal and human rights groups on Thursday called for miner Rio Tinto Ltd to be stripped of its status as a human rights leader following its destruction of an Aboriginal sacred site showing evidence of 46,000 years of human habitation. 

With state government approval, the world's biggest iron ore miner in May destroyed two sacred caves in the Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara region of Western Australia as part of a mine expansion. 

 Rio's response to blowing up the caves was "far from adequate", 35 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and human rights groups said in a letter requesting the miner be suspended from the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB). 

Netherlands-based CHRB is a public benchmark of corporate human rights performance. 

It lists Rio as the highest ranked extractives company globally on human rights issues, with a score in the second highest possible band.  

"We are calling on the Benchmark to ensure that the company's human rights ranking reflects the reality for people here on the ground," said Wayne Bergmann, a Kimberley Aboriginal leader and chief executive of Aboriginal charitable trust KRED. 

Rio apologised for the distress it caused to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people and launched an independent investigation into how the destruction occurred.

Thursday's letter disputed Rio's explanation of the incident as a "misunderstanding", saying that the indigenous land owners had brought to Rio's attention on several occasions the archaeological and ethnographic significance of the site. 

Rio declined to comment on the letter......

Prior to the November release of its Corporate Human Rights Benchmark 2020 CHRB issued this:

Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB), media release, 9 July 2020: 

Due to the destruction of a 46,000-year-old Aboriginal heritage site by Rio Tinto at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia on 24 May 2020, the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB) and the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA) have decided to append this statement to Rio Tinto’s latest CHRB results. 

It would be inappropriate for CHRB to continue to assess and rank Rio Tinto in one of the highest-scoring bands and as the top mining company without reference to this incident. 

The CHRB seeks to provide robust and credible information on companies’ actions to respect human rights across their business, and it would be misleading not to reference this severe impact as a complement to the latest results. 

The statement appears in the homepage banding table, in the company's latest scorecard and in the latest overall dataset.

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"It would be inappropriate for CHRB to continue to assess and rank Rio Tinto in one of the highest-scoring bands and as the top mining company without reference to this incident....The severity of the impact and the context in which it took place, including the process that led to it and allegations of other similar impacts involving the company, raise concerns that go beyond this specific incident and point to possibly more systemic weaknesses in the company’s approach to human rights." [CHRB response to the destruction of a 46,000-year-old Aboriginal heritage site by RioTinto at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia on 24 May 2020]

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Hopefully this statement means that Rio Tinto Ltd will get more than a small red flag next to its ranking with a brief one line explanation for ongoing human rights issues, such as was afforded to another extractive industry high flyer, BHP Billiton.

BACKGROUND

ABC News, 5 June 2020:

Mining giant Rio Tinto was alerted six years ago that at least one of the caves it blasted in Western Australia's Pilbara region last month was of "the highest archaeological significance in Australia".  

Advice delivered to Rio Tinto and the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) Indigenous people of the region six years ago was never publicly released. The ABC has been given a summary of the contents of the report, as well as earlier archaeological survey work and excavations at the sites dating back to 2004. 

The documentation of the 2014 report by archaeologist Dr Michael Slack confirmed one of the sites that was blasted, the Juukan-2 (Brock-21) cave, was rare in Australia and unique in the Pilbara. 

"The site was found to contain a cultural sequence spanning over 40,000 years, with a high frequency of flaked stone artefacts, rare abundance of faunal remains, unique stone tools, preserved human hair and with sediment containing a pollen record charting thousands of years of environmental changes," 

Dr Slack wrote. "In many of these respects, the site is the only one in the Pilbara to contain such aspects of material culture and provide a likely strong connection through DNA analysis to the contemporary traditional owners of such old Pleistocene antiquity."....

Before and After

Juukan Gorge caves, BBC News, 31 May 2020