Mining for Legal Luxuries: The Pitfalls and Potential of Nevsun Resources Ltd v Araya

Abstract Globalization has effectively enabled Canada’s domestically incorporated mining companies to escape the jurisdiction of the courts of the world, allowing them to carry out human rights abuses abroad with impunity. In February 2020, however, the Supreme Court of Canada issued a landmark judgment, Nevsun Resources Ltd v Araya, which attempted to address this jurisdictional gap. This decision held that Canadian corporations could potentially be liable under domestic law for breaches of customary international law perpetrated abroad. The decision has been criticized for straying too far from a classically positivist conception of international law. This article argues that such criticisms are well founded insofar as the majority’s judgment implicitly relies on progressive human-centric theories of international law without adequately addressing how these are reconcilable with international law as it is currently applied. It then explores the ideas that drive the majority’s opinion in order to propose two alternative approaches to holding corporations accountable that are more readily reconcilable with traditional state-centric conceptions of international law. Adopting these revised approaches could less contentiously lead to corporate accountability before future domestic courts. Finally, this article considers the potential international developments and repercussions to which this and other forward-looking decisions could lead.