Below is a sample letter for you to print out and post to the Chief Investment Officer at USS. You can also download the Word document by clicking here.
Feel free to change it in any way you like, or otherwise send it just as it is.
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Thank you for supporting Survival’s campaign against Vedanta. With your help, we can stop them from destroying the Dongria Kondh.
Peter Moon, CIO
London Investment Office of USS
13th Floor, 99 Bishopsgate
London
EC2M 3XD
DATE
Dear Mr Moon,
I am writing with regard to my USS pension. I am deeply concerned that my pension money is being invested in Vedanta Resources, a company which the Norwegian government’s Council on Ethics ruled should be excluded from the country’s Pension Fund ‘due to an unacceptable risk of complicity in present and future severe environmental damage and systematic human rights violations.’
Of most urgent concern is Vedanta’s proposed bauxite mine in the Niyamgiri Hills in Orissa. The Dongria Kondh tribe who live in the area have not given their free, prior and informed consent to a mine on their sacred mountain. The importance of obtaining this consent is enshrined, for example, in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and has been repeatedly recognized by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. It is also acknowledged by Indian law and especially by the Forest Rights Act, which empowers tribal peoples to protect their cultural and natural heritage.
Both India and the United Kingdom are parties to the Civil and Political Rights Covenant, which binds them not to deny to their ‘ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities … the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture [and] to profess and practice their own religion.’ The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples also recognizes the right of the Dongria Kondh ‘to maintain, protect, and have access in privacy to their religious and cultural sites’. The International Council on Mining and Minerals recently endorsed the same principle in its position statement on indigenous peoples.
Despite these laws and guidelines, Vedanta is still determined to mine Niyamgiri mountain, which is the Kondh peoples’ most sacred site.
The Indian Supreme Court’s Central Empowered Committee has recommended that ‘the use of the forest land in an ecologically sensitive area like the Niyamgiri Hills should not be permitted’ and that ‘this project may only be reconsidered after an alternative bauxite mine site is identified.’ Yet Vedanta is determined to mine there.
The Dongria Kondh do not want the mine to proceed. Nor do the local people affected by the neighbouring Lanjigarh refinery, who have also been protesting against its impacts on their livelihood and on the environment. These protests are set to escalate if the mine gets underway.
It seems clear, therefore, that Vedanta Resources is not an appropriate company for USS’s ‘responsible investment’. USS has stipulated that it treats ‘the financial interests of members as paramount’, but its legal responsibility is to act in ‘the interests of beneficiaries’, not only their financial interests. Whilst I understand that USS policy is to try to encourage better practice rather than disinvestment, this is an urgent and extremely grave case. The only acceptable course of action is for USS to disinvest immediately from Vedanta.
I look forward to your response on this matter.
Yours sincerely
YOUR NAME HERE