The English Court of Appeal rejected on Wednesday (May 6) a new appeal by mining company BHP regarding the 2015 collapse of the Fundão dam in Mariana, Minas Gerais state.

As a result, the November 2025 ruling stands, in which the English High Court held the Anglo-Australian company liable for the disaster. The judges found that BHP, Vale’s partner in managing the mining company Samarco, operated the dam and was aware of the risks prior to the breach, thereby demonstrating negligence, recklessness, and/or incompetence.

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On October 5, 2025, the tragedy in Mariana marked its tenth anniversary. The collapse of the Fundão dam released approximately 40 million cubic meters of toxic waste and mud into the Doce River. It also affected nearby municipalities and killed 19 people.

BHP had already filed an initial appeal seeking to overturn the ruling and had exhausted the last ordinary remedy available in the English legal system to challenge the judgment. In Wednesday’s decision, the court concluded that there is no compelling reason for the appeal to be heard.

In the English legal system, the right to appeal is not automatic. The interested party must obtain permission to file an appeal.

Consequently, Phase 2 of the proceedings remains in effect. This phase examines the categories of losses and the evidence used to quantify the damages suffered by the victims and determine compensation amounts. The trial hearing for this phase is scheduled for April 2027.

The law firm Pogust Goodhead, which represents the victims of the Mariana disaster in England, welcomed Wednesday’s decision.

“The Court of Appeal has now joined the High Court in concluding that BHP’s grounds for appeal have no realistic prospect of success. It is a resounding and unequivocal result. BHP is responsible for the worst environmental disaster in Brazil’s history and will have no further opportunity to overturn the decision,” said Jonathan Wheeler, a partner at the firm.

“Our clients have waited more than a decade for justice, while BHP has pursued every legal avenue to avoid accountability. Those avenues are now closed. We are focused on securing the compensation to which hundreds of thousands of Brazilians have long been entitled,” he added.

In a statement, BHP Brazil said that “it has been supporting Samarco to ensure fair and full reparation” and that it will continue its defense in England “vigorously and for as long as necessary.”

The company also stated that “it remains confident that the work carried out since 2015 and the New Rio Doce Agreement, signed in October 2024, which secured BRL 170 billion for reparations, provide the fastest and most efficient solution for compensating those affected. This work has already ensured payments to more than 625,000 people.”

According to the company, the British court recognized the compensation programs in 2024 and validated the settlements signed by those who had already received full compensation: “About 40 percent of the total individual claimants in the UK lawsuit will be excluded from the proceedings, which will significantly reduce the size and value of the claims filed there.”

The Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), affiliated with the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB), released this week the 40th edition of the report Conflicts in Rural Brazil. Incidents fell 28 percent, from 2,207 in 2024 to 1,593 in 2025. However, murders of workers and indigenous peoples of the land, waters, and forests doubled, rising from 13 to 26 victims last year.

Most of the murders took place in the Legal Amazon, an area of about 5 million km² that spans nine states and includes parts of three of Brazil’s seven biomes - the Amazon, Cerrado, and Pantanal. There were 16 cases, distributed across the states of Pará (7), Rondônia (7), and Amazonas (2).

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“These figures reveal the advance of a historic project of colonial and capitalist expansion in the Amazon, which continues to target and transform entire peoples and territories into objects of expropriation and extermination,” said Larissa Rodrigues, a member of the Articulation of the CPTs of the Amazon.

She also attributes this situation to the strengthening of a “consortium between land grabbing, organized crime, sectors of the state, and the private sector, which work together to target public lands and protected areas.”

The report shows that farmers are the main perpetrators involved in the murders. Of the 26 cases, they were responsible for 20, either as instigators or as perpetrators.

Other forms of violence that also increased from 2024 to 2025 included arrests (from 71 to 111), humiliation cases (from five to 142), and false imprisonment cases (from one to 105).

“The rise in cases of humiliation and false imprisonment, for example, is due to the arbitrary actions of the Military Police of the state of Rondônia, which in November 2025, as part of Operation Godos, interrupted a public meeting involving about 100 landless families evicted from their camps, as well as officials from the Ministry of Agrarian Development and Family Farming,” said Gustavo Arruda, a researcher at the Dom Tomás Balduino Documentation Center (Cedoc/CPT).

According to the researcher, the increase in arrests is also due to specific actions by state security forces against communities. As an example, he cited the Military Police of the state of Rondônia, which carried out several operations targeting members of the League of Poor Peasants (LCP).

Violence

When all types of conflicts are considered, land-related violence accounts for the largest share (75% or 1,186 cases), followed by labor conflicts (10% or 159), water conflicts (9% or 148), and encampments, occupations, and repossessions (6% or 100).

The main cases of land-related violence were pesticide contamination (127 cases), land invasions (193), and contract killings (113). The main victims were indigenous peoples (258 incidents), followed by squatters (248), quilombolas (244), and landless people (153).

Farmers represent the group responsible for the most violence in land-related cases (515 cases), followed by business owners (180), the federal government (114), and state governments (85).

The main cases of water-related conflict involved rural communities’ resistance to destruction or pollution (1,034), non-compliance with legal procedures (754), reduced access to water (425), and pesticide contamination (129).

Indigenous peoples were the main victims in water conflicts (42 incidents), followed by quilombolas (24), small farmers (20), and riverine communities (17).

The main perpetrators of violence in the water sector were mining companies (34), business owners (29), small-scale miners (26), farmers (23), and hydroelectric power plants (9).

Slave-like labor

The CPT report indicates a 5 percent increase in cases of slave-like labor or conditions analogous to slavery (159 in 2025) and a 23 percent increase in the total number of workers rescued from these conditions (1,991).

The researchers highlight the construction of a power plant in the municipality of Porto Alegre do Norte, in the state of Mato Grosso, where 586 people were rescued. They had been recruited in the North and Northeast regions of the country and were forced to sleep in cramped, overcrowded rooms, received inadequate food, and suffered frequent water and power outages.

The economic sectors with the highest number of rescued workers are power plant construction (586), crop farming (479), sugarcane (253), mining (170), and livestock farming (154). According to CPT, these are sectors that historically show the highest incidence of slave-like labor, with farming and livestock raising as recurring cases.

Socio-environmental platform

On Monday (Apr. 27), the Pastoral Land Commission, in partnership with the Institute for Society, Population, and Nature (ISPN), launched the Socio-Environmental Observatory, a civil society initiative that compiles systematized data from 1980 to 2023 on human rights violations, deforestation, and the expansion of industrial agriculture in Brazil.

According to the organizers, data from different sources will be compiled, cross-referenced, and made available in an interactive digital environment, allowing users to visualize, in a segmented way by state and municipality, the direct relationship between the expansion of commodity production and socio-environmental conflicts in the country.