"Letter to Acacia Mining's Board of Directors expressing concerns on the company's grievance mechanism'

We are writing to you as a board member of Acacia Mining plc to express our concerns about the community grievance process at the North Mara Gold Mine in Tanzania, which we believe continues to fall far short of the company’s human rights obligations. We hope you will raise this as a top priority at your annual general meeting this week and urge Acacia’s management to rectify it…

We recognize Acacia has set out to improve its original flawed grievance mechanism, but more work needs to be done. The revised mechanism is still not compliant with human rights obligations, including the effectiveness criteria for operational-level grievance mechanisms set out under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. It lacks human rights benchmarks, lacks transparency, lacks independence, provides very limited legal assistance for an overly legalistic process, and creates confusion about whether it will accept complaints about police abuse at the mine site, among other problems…

The lack of adequate remedy for the harm suffered is part and parcel of an overall lack of justice. To date, we are not aware of any police officer having been held to account for the unlawful use of force or other serious human rights violations at North Mara mine. In its 2016 annual report, Acacia said it had fired one employee for excessive use of force, but did not say what the perpetrator did or if the individual faced justice. Acacia has also not reported on the conduct of the police force and the reliability of its investigations.