2023-12-08 02:40:07
Young Marina Paula Oliveira, 28 years old, creator of the Movement for Popular Sovereignty in Mining, which fights for the rights of victims of the Brumadinho dam, was the first honoree of the night, this Thursday (7), at Quai d’Orsay, equivalent to the French Itamaraty Palace. She was awarded the French Republic’s Human Rights Prize for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, which has been awarded for 35 years by the French National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CNCDH).
By Luiza Ramos and RFI
The award, which aims to support individual and collective actions to defend and protect human rights around the world, this year addressed the theme ‘Defenders of the environment and access to water’ and five countries were awarded diplomas and medals: Uganda, Kosovo , Mexico, Peru and Brazil.
The laureates, sometimes threatened in their own countries because of their actions in favor of human rights, are placed under the diplomatic protection of French embassies abroad.
Marina Paula Oliveira said in an interview with RFI who, due to the threats and intimidation he has already suffered due to his activism in Brumadinho, entered the French protection program in 2022 and emphasizes the importance of obtaining support to continue his project.
“I know that we are not special cases, but we are looking, together with partner organizations, for ways to protect ourselves to continue in this fight, because the fight is not optional. We have to continue doing it, but there are ways to continue doing it and try to minimize risks and that is what we have tried to do in recent years”, declares the young woman.
The case of Brumadinho
Marina has become an environmental activist and human rights defender since the mining dam collapse in Brumadinho, her hometown, on January 25, 2019.
The dam, which received waste from Vale’s mining operations, collapsed, sweeping away tons of contaminated mud and killing almost 300 people, including several of her acquaintances and friends, remembered with photographs on a t-shirt featured during her speech before the French minister of Foreign Trade and Foreign Relations, Olivier Brecht, and the president of the CNCDH, Jean-Marie Burguburu.
Marina Paula shows a bottle with “Brumadinho water” and a t-shirt with photos of the dam victims on January 25, 2019. © Luiza RamosRFI
In an impactful gesture, the young activist also showed a pet bottle containing the clay that took place in the region: “We didn’t have much of a choice. It’s our life, our community, our friends, so we had to fight, understand the human rights violations that were happening and continue to happen today”, he denounces.
She also says that she had to join other activists for the Brumadinho cause to “organize demands and complaints at the state, national and international level”. “And this is only possible with a lot of collective work, because there are many of us, we are almost a million affected from 26 municipalities in the Paraopeba river basin”, she details.
Almost five years after the tragedy, Marina Paula Oliveira is a doctoral student in International Relations and recently released her book “The price of a socio-environmental crime: behind the scenes of the process of repairing the dam collapse in Brumadinho”.
Accountability and Redress
The internationalist reveals to RFI feel “very honored” with the honor granted by France, but “at the same time it is sad to know that it is still necessary to have this type of award to defend rights that are so basic and simple in the lives of the entire world”, she laments.
“The visibility we would like to achieve is justice, criminal liability of the companies involved, in this case Vale and Tüv Süd, a German company that presented the dam’s stability certification, and from that, also concrete demands for full repair for the communities that to this day remain without repair”, he emphasizes.
When remembering that Brumadinho today has one hundred orphaned children, Marina gets emotional and compares human rights to love. She hopes there will be more empathy so there can be justice. “The power of love is very transformative (…) I was able to transform myself through pain and love for the community (…) and to be able to build this more supportive world, we will need everyone”, she concludes.
Brazilian activist Marina Paula Oliveira was awarded at the Quai d’Orsay, in Paris, on December 7, 2023. © Luiza RamosRFI
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