Sor. Rattanamanee Polkla
Thailand
With more than twenty years of practice in human rights and environmental matters, Thai lawyer Sor.Rattanamanee Polkla is deeply committed to environmental justice. With her organization, the Community Resource Centre Foundation (CRC), she provides legal aid to communities who face serious negative environmental and social impacts as a result of development projects. Her motto? ‘We are lawyers, we are law-users, but we are also law-makers’.
In the village of Na Nong Bong in the Loei province of Thailand, the Tungkum Company Ltd started operating an Gold-mining project in 2006. The ground and water in the area became contaminated with arsenic and cyanide as a result of the operation of the project, and had a negative impact on the ability of villagers to grow their rice and other crops. The local community protested against the Gold-mining project from the moment the impact started. Besides facing the environmental pollution from the project, the community faced judicial harassment by the mining company in 20 different cases. From the start of these struggles, the Project for Public Policy on Mineral Resources (PPM), a Non-Governmental Organisation, assisted the community. PPM and the community requested Sor.Rattanamanee Polkla and the CRC team to support the community during the judicial harassment. Most of the cases had been granted on the favour of community.