The Human Right to a Healthy Environment: Corporate Responsibility in Critical Mineral Extraction

This paper argues that the emerging human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment should guide the governance of critical minerals by incorporating the corporate responsibility to respect human rights throughout supply chains to ensure a racially just energy transition. It frames the climate crisis within the history and political economy of racial capitalism, contending that without rights-based guardrails, mineral supply chains risk reproducing the extractive harms and racialized disparities of the fossil fuel era, including labor abuses, displacement, water depletion, and violence disproportionately borne by racialized and Indigenous communities. Methodologically, the paper combines doctrinal analysis of international norms with a comparative assessment of national regulatory frameworks governing critical minerals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (cobalt) and Chile (lithium). Although both jurisdictions remain shaped by colonial legacies of extractivism, they diverge institutionally and legally.

The paper concludes that achieving a just transition requires interpreting the environmental right and the UNGPs to impose more robust regulation and corporate due diligence across the full value chain, centering racial and environmental justice, meaningful participation, and effective remedy; without transformative application of these norms, the green economy risks entrenching “sacrifice zones” rather than dismantling them.