If UBS claims to respect indigenous rights how is it in business with Glencore?
Giant Swiss bank’s commitments belied by notorious Cerrejón mine in Colombia
In November last year an indigenous Wayúu man from Colombia, Leobardo Sierra Frias, spoke at an event held at University College London titled “Unmasking Glencore”, organised by the UK-based NGOs ABColombia, London Mining Network and other organisations. He had come to the UK all the way from the La Guajira region on South America’s northernmost tip as part of a delegation on a desperately urgent, important mission: to raise awareness of the devastating social and environmental impacts that for years Latin America’s largest open pit coal mine, Cerrejón, run by a subsidiary of the Swiss-headquartered, British-registered multinational company Glencore, is alleged to have had on the Wayúu and Afro-Colombians.
“Trampling over fundamental rights,” was how that evening Sierra Frias described 40 years of the mine’s operations. “The right to food, the right to health, the right to life.”
Two reports were published to coincide with the delegation’s visit: one by Oxfam, Fair Finance International (FFI) and two other organisations, and another by two Colombian NGOs, CINEP and CENSAT Agua Vida. Ultimately taking in eight countries, the delegation’s aim was to pressure Glencore itself, the banks and other financial institutions that invest in or provide financial services to the company, and European governments. Among other things, this was further proof that, if the financial sector voluntarily refuses to ensure that its actions don’t negatively affect people and planet, then legislation must force them.
According to Oxfam et al’s report, A Toxic Legacy: Glencore's Footprint in Colombia and Peru, no financial institution between January 2016 and June 2023 effectively approved or underwrote more in loans to Glencore than UBS - a total of US$3.2 billion. Not only that, but the giant Swiss bank - which merged with Credit Suisse last year - was listed in the top five of the company’s European investors, holding more than US$300 million.
Yet UBS, like various other big banks nowadays, claims to respect indigenous people’s rights, albeit weakly and somewhat confusingly. In its “Sustainability and Climate Risk Policy Framework” the bank seems to be clear when stating it “will not engage in commercial activities that infringe the rights of indigenous peoples”, but then follows that by saying - rather less clearly and with a few potential loopholes thrown in - it “will not knowingly provide financial or advisory services to clients whose primary business activity, or where the proposed transaction, is associated with severe environmental or social damage to or through the use of indigenous peoples’ rights in accordance with IFC Performance Standard 7” - the latter referring to the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation. In an earlier, no-longer-valid incarnation of that policy, titled “Environmental and Social Risk Policy Framework”, the bank stated exactly the same thing.
But if that first, apparently clear claim about respecting indigenous people’s rights is true, how can UBS be in business with Glencore? Obviously the bank can’t pretend it doesn’t know about Cerrejón, to name just one of the company’s many operations. Not only is the mine internationally notorious - the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment recently called it “one of the most disturbing situations that I have learned about” - but over the last two years UBS employees have met twice with Colombian activists specifically to talk about it.
The first meeting, held online, was in January 2022 and featured various representatives from communities in La Guajira affected by Cerrejón. The second was in Zurich last November, after the delegation’s visit to London, and involved various bank employees. Topics discussed included the mine’s alleged social and environmental impacts, the broader regional context of extreme poverty, drought and the social and economic emergency declared mid-last year, and Glencore’s decision to sue Colombia through a so-called “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) mechanism.
One of the Colombians present at the Zurich meeting was Greylis Pinto, an Afro-Colombian woman whose community was forcibly re-settled to make way for Cerrejón more than 10 years ago.
“What we told the bank was all the problems we’ve been experiencing as a result of the mine,” Pinto tells me. “What we told them was that Cerrejón, with all kinds of deception, lies and bad faith, drove us from our community and territory to some other land that isn’t ours, or like ours, and promised us a better quality of life where we would have access to water 24 hours a day, where we would have jobs and be able to support our families, where we would have social programs for the vulnerable members of our community, and many other things that up until now, 11 years later, we still don’t have. Where we were before, we lived from cultivating crops, from raising animals. Here we can’t. There isn’t any water, and there isn’t enough land to be able to do what we did before. That was what we told them.”
Another member of the Colombian delegation who met UBS was Carolina Matiz Gonzalez, from the Bogotá-based NGO CINEP. Their recently published report, Does Cerrejón always win?, had been sent to UBS personnel - Megan Morrow, Christian Leitz and Robert Ramer - more than a week before the meeting. While noting that Glencore has “denied the legitimacy of the claims against it and has affirmed its commitment to human rights and the environment”, that report highlights the number of rulings or pronouncements by Colombian courts and other bodies which contradict that assertion, as well as the “disturbing level of impunity” the company enjoys.
“For us, it was essential to talk to the bank, given what they say about human rights and climate change,” Matiz Gonzalez tells me. “We presented our report to them and they asked about whether the court rulings - the 12 that there are - have been complied with, and they asked about the consultation process as well - it wasn’t done “prior”, it was done later, as required by a Constitutional Court ruling in 2017. What UBS said was that they would try to incorporate the information provided and that they would research the ISDS lawsuit regarding the Bruno stream filed by Glencore against Colombia, and that they would ask for clarification from the company about that issue.”
How did the UBS employees appear to react when they heard about the mine’s alleged impacts?
“Of the six UBS people at the meeting I thought that two of the women seemed genuinely interested and moved regarding the human rights violations,” she says. “Some of them were quite inquisitive in trying to understand the matter, others less so.”
According to Matiz Gonzalez, UBS also asked for more information after the meeting was over.
“They sent an email afterwards asking for additional material,” she says. “We sent them the 2017 court ruling about free, prior and informed consultation, and a report by an allied organisation summarising how other rulings haven’t been complied with. We also sent them our response to questions raised by Glencore regarding the Does Cerrejón always win? report.”
Accompanying the Colombians meeting UBS was Stephan Suhner, from the NGO Switzerland-Colombia Working Group.
“I emphasised that these problems are not new, but long-standing,” Suhner tells me. “I’ve been working on Cerrejón and Glencore for nearly 20 years and I haven’t seen any fundamental changes in all this time. We all said that UBS should look in detail at what is going on on-the-ground and not just do desk research, or rely on what the company tells them. Some of the people in the meeting were quite interested, they asked some good questions, but [the man running it] became bored and shut it down quite quickly without a proper conclusion. They have their Guidelines, Code of Conduct, Human Rights policies and so on, and if they were to take what they say seriously then they shouldn't be investing in - or lending money to - companies like Glencore.”
Also accompanying the Colombian delegation was Kees Kodde, from Oxfam and FFI.
“I was optimistic afterwards because I thought that the UBS personnel were listening very carefully and they were taking down a lot of notes, and then later one of them also came back to me asking for some more documents, which I shared,” says Kodde. “But since then it has been just silence. I was disappointed about that. That often happens with these banks.”
For Ryan Brightwell, from the Netherlands-based NGO BankTrack, this is further evidence that banks’ voluntary, non-legally binding commitments can be ineffective or are often weak and full of loopholes, and therefore what is ultimately necessary is legislation. For years, calls have been made for the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) - currently going through final negotiations in Brussels - to include the financial sector, but for now that battle appears to have been lost.
“Unless bank policies require clients to respect Indigenous Peoples' rights across all their operations, with finance being withdrawn if they don't, they’re just not worth the paper they’re written on,” Brightwell says. “UBS’s long-standing support for Glencore is one more example of why we need legislation that forces banks to conduct proper environmental and human rights checks, and enables people ultimately affected by the companies that banks are supporting to hold them to account in the courts.”
According to the Financial Exclusions Tracker, more than 30 financial institutions have already cut ties with Glencore - the majority on climate or environmental grounds, some because of human rights, some for other reasons, including corruption. Might UBS now do the same? A bank spokesperson effectively ignored that question when I put it to him and instead insisted that UBS’s “Sustainability and Climate Risk Policy Framework” is “stringent” and enables the bank to “identify and manage potential adverse impacts on the climate, environment, and human rights”, even though that appears to be patently contradicted by Cerrejón.
“We continuously foster an active and regular dialogue with various stakeholder groups, including NGOs,” the UBS spokesperson says. “We do not comment on any specific NGO engagement and/or any (potential) client relationship.”