Legacy Grievances and Historical Claims

A woman walked four hours to a temporary claims office in Mozambique carrying a plastic bag. Inside were a photocopied receipt for a goat, issued as compensation for the destruction of a homestead; a hand-drawn map of her family’s machamba, the subsistence farm that had sustained three generations; and a photograph of a concrete foundation, all that remained of a school promised and never built. She did not ask for money. She asked for someone to look at what had happened and say that it was wrong.

Eighteen months later she had a settlement: formal acknowledgment of the homestead, compensation priced on what the farm produced rather than what a cadastral table said, a public apology from the operator’s country manager, and the school, built, with a plaque naming the community whose land had made the project possible. The word that came back was that the plaque mattered more than the money.

Every company that acquires, inherits or closes an old operation acquires its past with it. Those claims sit on no balance sheet and they do not expire. They wait for a transaction, a closure announcement, a change in law, or a generation that decides to ask again, and by then the mechanism that could have absorbed them has been shut for years.

This book is the method for resolving them. It borrows from transitional justice, the discipline built for exactly this problem in a different arena, and sets out the legal architecture that decides whether an obligation survives a change of ownership. The cases are real and named: the Tshiamiso Trust paying silicosis claims across southern Africa, the Giant Mine and the arsenic that Canada will be managing in perpetuity, the coal closures of Appalachia, and Colombia’s recognition of a territory itself as a victim. So are the failures, which are reported here with the same candour as the settlements.