By J. Arroyo Olea - Resumen.cl

The Supreme Court of Chile overturned a ruling in favor of the Canadian mining company Aclara, marking a legal setback for the company after the local Concepción Court of Appeals had ruled in its favour in a case against environmental defenders in Penco who criticized its rare earth project.

On Tuesday, June 11, the Supreme Court's ruling in response to the appeal filed in defense of Camila Arriagada and Arnoldo Cárcamo was made public. Both residents of Penco were accused by Aclara Resources of managing a social media account linked to the organization Keule Resiste, and of publishing criticism of the mining project and known people behind the company through this account.

In February this year, Aclara Resources, which intends to install a rare earth extraction project in the hills of Penco, filed an injunction (recurso de protección) against both environmental defenders. The Concepción Court of Appeals ruled in its favor on June 1st, ordering "the defendants to remove all messages or images or content that they have reposted from the Instagram account @Keuleresiste or the Facebook page Keule Resiste, (...) and to refrain, in the future, from acts such as those that gave rise to the present action."

However, the country's highest court has now slammed the door on the Concepción Court's ruling. Specifically, the Third Chamber of the Supreme Court overturned the appealed ruling and, in line with this, rejected the constitutional action.

The Supreme Court's ruling establishes that, considering “the evidence accompanying the case file, it is not possible to consider that the acts denounced as illegal or arbitrary were committed by the defendants, since there is no reference, mention, or identifying element of such acts anywhere in the case file.”

This comes in response to the controversial decision by the Concepcion Court of Appeals, which did not prove that the two Penco residents were administrators of the social media page in question, and was therefore interpreted as a decision that limited the posting and sharing of content questioning the mining project.

Camila Arriagada told RESUMEN  that she welcomed the decision to overturn the ruling “to make it clear that Aclara Resources is in the wrong and has engaged in bad faith with the Penco community by taking legal action against people who are critical of this mining project.”

Similarly, Arriagada stated that this resolution “highlights the poor functioning of the Court of Appeals, which issued a ruling without evidence, in an arbitrary manner, and clearly shows that any attempt to censor and silence opposition to this project will not be tolerated.”

Read the original article in spanish here.