WHERE VICTIMS

TRANSFORM


INTO SURVIVORS

WASHINGTON, July 13, 2026 – As the UN Security Council prepares to convene an Arria-Formula meeting on natural resources and peace today, Panzi Foundation is urging member states to move beyond existing approaches focused primarily on risk management and accountability, and embrace a justice-first approach that addresses the structural drivers of resource-related conflict and ensures that natural resource governance delivers lasting peace and shared prosperity.

The gap exposed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo

The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s initiative for this discussion recognizes a central challenge facing the international community: existing approaches to natural resource governance have not prevented the continued use of minerals to fuel conflict, undermine development and deepen insecurity. Panzi Foundation’s contribution is to highlight a critical dimension of this gap: the limited integration and enforceability of justice-centered principles within mineral governance systems, which remain largely oriented toward due diligence, risk management, and traceability rather than proactively ensuring meaningful benefit-sharing, participation, and effective remedy when harm occurs.

For more than two decades, responses to conflict-linked minerals have prioritized disclosure and corporate due diligence, and more recently, traceability. These remain necessary as tools, but the DRC experience shows they are not sufficient to drive outcomes. While some due diligence obligations are increasingly becoming mandatory, the obligations that determine whether mineral governance produces just outcomes remain fragmented and insufficiently enforceable.

As demand for critical minerals and other natural resources accelerates, securing supply cannot be separated from building legitimate and resilient mineral value chains. Supply chains built on unresolved grievances, exclusion and harm are not secure supply chains; they are sources of fragility that can undermine development and create insecurity beyond producing regions. The future of global mineral security therefore depends not only on reliable physical access to resources, but on governance systems that ensure minerals are sourced, transformed, and traded in ways that respect human and community rights and create equitable value from mine to market.

Not an absence of law, but an asymmetry in international governance

International law is not silent on natural resources. Permanent sovereignty over natural resources connects resource sovereignty to national development and the well-being of people¹. The Right to Development recognizes the right of people to participate in and enjoy development and calls for the fair distribution of its benefits². International human rights law, international humanitarian law, and business and human rights standards provide further protections.

The Security Council has recognized the relationship between natural resources and conflict, especially in the DRC, where its reports date from the early 2000s. Its practice has developed its own due diligence guidelines, imposed sanctions, and progressively addressed illicit exploitation, trafficking and the economic lifelines of armed groups. Most recently, resolution 2773 (2025) recognized illegal natural resource exploitation as a root cause of the conflict in eastern DRC and called for greater transparency, traceability, certification, and due diligence. However, there is a clear opportunity to strengthen this architecture by moving beyond preventive measures toward a more transformative governance approach that establishes binding commitments to ensure extraction contributes to shared prosperity, environmental responsibility, and durable peace.

The most operationalized mineral governance rules focus on identifying risk, tracing origin, and regulating market access. The principles most directly concerned with who benefits, who participates, and how harm is repaired remain dispersed or weakly operationalized. The problem is one of fragmentation and asymmetry.

The economic consequences of the gap are significant. In 2024, the DRC accounted for 74 percent of global cobalt mine production³. Yet UNCTAD finds that processing and refining capture a disproportionate share of value: in 2022, refined cobalt averaged $20.8 per kilogram compared with $6.6 per kilogram for raw material⁴.

Three justice tests for future frameworks

Panzi Foundation proposes that existing and future natural resource governance frameworks be assessed against three questions:

• Distributive justice: Who benefits?

Traceability and risk-focused due diligence do not equal or lead to benefit-sharing. A just mineral governance framework must proactively assess whether the value generated by extraction contributes to the development of mineral-producing countries and mining-affected communities.

Relevant considerations include revenue-sharing, community benefit mechanisms, local procurement, skills development, employment, gender equity, access to finance, and local value addition. These principles are already reflected in permanent sovereignty over natural resources, the Right to Development and the UN Secretary-General’s Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals. The challenge is making them measurable and enforceable. The DRC illustrates that the gap is not always the absence of legal provisions, but their implementation. For example, the 2018 Mining Code introduced community development mechanisms and royalty-sharing provisions, yet oversight bodies have identified persistent challenges in revenue transparency and the management of community development funds.

• Procedural justice: Who decides?

A just mineral governance framework must assess whether affected communities have meaningful decision-making power over activities affecting their land, livelihoods, and futures.

Key considerations include access to information, meaningful participation, representation in governance structures, gender-responsive decision-making, and respect for free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). While FPIC is increasingly recognized in international standards, its application across mineral governance frameworks remains fragmented and largely non-binding. The DRC illustrates this challenge: while national mining and environmental frameworks require consultation and community agreements (cahiers des charges), they do not establish a general right to FPIC. Closing this gap requires moving beyond consultation toward mandatory and meaningful participation and consent standards.

For Panzi Foundation, this dimension is inseparable from gender justice: women and survivors cannot remain visible only as victims of harm while being excluded from the decisions, institutions, and governance systems that shape the economic structures connected to that harm.

• Restorative justice: What happens when harm occurs?

Due diligence is primarily reactive. Yet in conflict-affected mineral regions, including eastern DRC, communities continue to bear the consequences of decades of conflict, illicit exploitation and illegal trade, displacement, loss of livelihoods, and conflict-related sexual violence.

Restorative justice requires addressing both implementation gaps and accountability gaps by creating pathways for recognition, repair, and non-repetition. Existing domestic mechanisms, including mining royalties, community development funds, and social obligations, can contribute to repairing the social and economic impacts of extraction, but persistent governance and implementation failures often limit their transformative potential. At the same time, international mineral governance frameworks provide limited avenues to address responsibility, accountability, and meaningful reparative measures for actors who have benefited from conflict-related mineral exploitation. Instead, it focuses on occasional sanctions and periodic statements of concern.

National civil-liability laws in consumer countries offer one potential avenue, but their reliability varies considerably and is not fixed over time. National due diligence laws demonstrate emerging pathways for accountability but remain fragmented and uneven. While some jurisdictions provide avenues for civil liability for human rights harms across supply chains, others rely primarily on administrative enforcement or have yet to establish effective remedies. The DRC’s own experience illustrates these limitations: efforts to seek accountability for alleged conflict-linked minerals in international supply chains have faced significant legal and jurisdictional barriers, highlighting the absence of a coherent mechanism for remedy across complex mineral value chains.

A system capable of tracing minerals across jurisdictions should also be capable of tracing and identifying responsibility when serious harm occurs. Future frameworks should therefore consider not only grievance mechanisms and access to remedy, but also accountability measures, reparations, and pathways for communities affected by historical and ongoing harms.

Implications for the July process: Toward a Justice-Centered Governance Framework

The question is not simply whether a future instrument should be binding or voluntary. The prior question is: binding around what? Panzi Foundation encourages the July process to:

• assess existing natural resource governance frameworks against distributive, procedural, and restorative justice;
• recognize fair⁵ benefit-sharing and local value addition as core governance principles, grounded in the Right to Development;
• require active, free and meaningful participation of affected communities, including women, survivors, in the design and governance of future frameworks (including dedicated UNSC debates);
• examine a coherent remedy architecture capable of addressing past, current and future harm across mineral value chains; and
• ensure that any future international process ensures direct and inclusive civil society participation.

An illustrative method

Such an assessment could plot instruments along two axes: legal bindingness (from voluntary guidance to directly applicable regulation) and justice orientation (the extent to which operative provisions – not stated purpose – engage distributive, procedural and restorative justice). Coding should draw on each instrument’s binding text rather than its preamble, remain qualitative and transparent rather than a numerical score, and stay open to challenge and revision by legal experts. Panzi Foundation presents the figure below solely as an illustration of this possible methodology for consideration and adaptation within the July discussions; it is not intended as a definitive scoring or ranking of individual instruments. Rather, it draws on existing comparative legal approaches and aims to demonstrate how future assessments could more systematically examine the relationship between legal design, enforceability, and justice outcomes.

Closing the gap between principle and practice

The international community does not lack principles or frameworks relevant to the governance of natural resources, nor does it lack recognition of the importance of justice. Rather, it lacks a coherent governance architecture capable of integrating these principles into a system that confronts the historical, political, and economic drivers of inequality embedded in mineral extraction. Too often, existing frameworks address the consequences of governance failures as isolated risks or externalities, rather than addressing the structural conditions that produce and perpetuate them.

Closing this normative gap therefore requires moving beyond a framework primarily focused on identifying and mitigating risks toward one that embeds justice as a foundational objective of mineral governance. This means not only preventing harm but ensuring that governance systems are designed to generate equitable outcomes, strengthen accountability, and create lasting value for the people and environments on which mineral development depends.

For Panzi Foundation, that is where the assessment of the normative gap should begin.

“Our greatest legacy will not be the minerals we extract, but the society we build with them.” Dr Denis Mukwege

For any media inquiries, please reach out to media@panzi.org.

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About Panzi Foundation
Panzi Hospital and Foundation provides survivors of sexual violence with access to compassionate, holistic care in the Democratic Republic of Congo. At Panzi, survivors receive comprehensive health services, psychosocial support, job-skills training and socio-economic reintegration opportunities, as well as access to legal services. Since 1999, Panzi has served over 87,000 survivors across the country, empowering them to not only survive, but to thrive as they rebuild their lives.

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1. UN General Assembly Resolution 1803 (XVII), Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, 14 December 1962, para. 1. ↩︎
2. UN General Assembly Resolution 41/128, Declaration on the Right to Development, 4 December 1986, arts. 1, 2 and 8. ↩︎
3. Cobalt Institute, Cobalt Factsheet (July 2025), citing Cobalt Institute Market Report 2024. ↩︎
4. UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Global Trade Update: The Shifting Dynamics of Critical Minerals Trade (June 2026). ↩︎
5. While fairness is increasingly referenced in discussions on critical minerals and the energy transition, its meaning in the context of mineral governance remains insufficiently developed. See Heffron (2022), who highlights the need for a more robust understanding of fairness in the context of the energy transition. ↩︎

BUKAVU, May 22, 2026 – During a press conference held on May 19, 2026, Panzi General Hospital shared its rapid response and contingency plan in anticipation of potential Ebola cases. While most of the suspected and reported cases are in Ituri, one case has now been reported in South Kivu, 50 km from Bukavu.

In this context, several concrete measures have been implemented to ensure the safety of patients, staff and, community activities. To date, the following measures have been announced:

• The creation of a designated area within the hospital for the potential management of suspected or confirmed cases;
• The provision of personal protective equipment (PPE) to ensure the safety of staff and our patients;
• The organization of staff awareness sessions regarding protocols for prevention, early detection, and case management;
• The strengthening of specific health and safety protocols for our teams’ travel to rural areas, particularly in the context of mobile clinics and community-based activities.

Panzi’s response and contingency plan is coordinated by Dr. Aline Byabene and supported by Dr. Parvine Basimane, two experienced infectious disease specialists who have been actively engaged in the fight against and management of pandemics since COVID-19 and, previous outbreaks of the Zaire strain of Ebola.

Dr Joyeux Bwami, who spoke earlier this week, called upon the residents of Bukavu, as well as those of the South Kivu province, to promptly report any suspected cases of Ebola observed within the community.

Recalling the chain of transmission, Dr. Parvine Basimane cautioned around respecting barrier measures: “We must avoid any contact with patients’ bodily fluids, refrain from handling the bodies of suspected cases, and promptly report any person showing symptoms. It is critical to raise awareness about prevention methods.”

The current security situation in the provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu is creating a particularly conducive environment for the resurgence and rapid spread of epidemic diseases, especially the Ebola virus disease. Panzi Hospital has already faced critical cases, particularly during the management of severe COVID-19 cases throughout the pandemic. In response to this resurgence, our teams anticipate significant challenges, especially regarding the transportation of samples collected in the east to the capital, Kinshasa.

For any media inquiries, please reach out to media@panzi.org.

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About Panzi Foundation
Panzi Hospital and Foundation provides survivors of sexual violence with access to compassionate, holistic care in the Democratic Republic of Congo. At Panzi, survivors receive comprehensive health services, psychosocial support, job-skills training and socio-economic reintegration opportunities, as well as access to legal services. Since 1999, Panzi has served over 87,000 survivors across the country, empowering them to not only survive, but to thrive as they rebuild their lives.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak.

My name is Nicole Namwezi Batumike, and I serve as the Policy and Advocacy Lead at Panzi Foundation. Today, I will share Panzi’s perspective: peace in eastern Congo will remain unachievable unless the people most affected are meaningfully consulted and placed at the heart of humanitarian and structural solutions.

Panzi Hospital and Foundation Headquarters are based in Bukavu, in the Congolese province of South Kivu. The institution was founded in 1999 by Dr. Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist, human rights advocate, and 2018 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Since its founding, Panzi has treated more than 90,000 survivors of sexual violence.

Many of the survivors treated at Panzi come from mining areas, where armed violence, illicit extraction, intentional destruction of villages, and land dispossession intersect.

For the past 30 years, Congolese people have faced relentless, inhuman levels of violence. But in 2025 alone, OCHA reported 220,000 cases of gender-based violence—a 69 percent increase from 2024—and three months after Goma and Bukavu were seized by M23 last year, UNICEF warned that a child was raped roughly every thirty minutes.

However, at the very moment survivors need care the most, the health system that should support them has been severely weakened by the destruction and looting of medical facilities. Compounding this crisis, a July 2025 brief by Physicians for Human Rights finds that recent U.S. funding cuts have contributed to a more than 50 percent reduction in sexual and reproductive health services. While the United States is heavily engaged diplomatically in the peace process, a temporary return to stronger involvement in humanitarian response would complement these efforts, particularly given the country’s historic leadership in establishing the PEP kit system for survivors.

The Congolese people also welcome recent diplomatic measures addressing regional instability, including U.S. Treasury sanctions on the Rwanda Defence Force and senior officials for their role in supporting the M23 rebellion and destabilizing eastern Congo. Justice and accountability are essential to any peace process, and these measures offer a glimpse of hope.

For decades, stabilization and responsible sourcing initiatives—including mechanisms aimed at improving traceability like ITSCI—have involved actors implicated in regional violence, such as James Kabarebe, a retired Rwanda general and current Senior Defence and Security Advisor in the Office of the President of Rwanda, who the US sanctioned last year in February. While engagement with such actors may be operationally required for technical or diplomatic reasons, sustainable peace and economic integration cannot be led by those whose actions perpetuate instability. This is not an argument against dialogue—it is about sequencing, legitimacy, accountability, and inclusion.

Communities that have endured decades of displacement, sexual violence, and land dispossession remain peripheral in shaping their future. Their participation is often consultative and episodic, while sanctioned actors retain structural influence.

At the request of the U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa, several civil society representatives, including myself, were invited to review an initial draft of the Regional Economic Integration Framework (REIF) and provide feedback. While we appreciated the opportunity, there were no formal feedback loops or clear mechanisms for ongoing communication.

Although not all of our recommendations were incorporated, the final version of the framework—which we discovered when it was published on December 4th—did include some improvements. These included stronger language on formalizing the artisanal mining sector and addressing illicit mineral trade. However, it is important to note that these remain minimum standards already reflected in previous frameworks.

Three things that we emphasized in our feedback is 1) integration must be conditional. It cannot proceed under conditions of occupation, insecurity, or structural inequality. 2) We also stressed the need to integrate procedural, distributive, and restorative safeguards to support sustainable economic integration. 3) Among our proposals was the introduction of regional processing quotas, which would prioritize developing the DRC’s own value-addition capacity before expanding investment in neighboring countries. This would help address infrastructure gaps that currently enable smuggling and illicit trade. These are minimum conditions for any economic partnership to have lasting potential.

If, as presented by both the U.S. and the DRC, the shared objective is to move beyond long-term humanitarian dependence and toward economically viable partnerships, economic and peace initiatives must reflect that ambition. Durable peace depends on local ownership, structured oversight, and meaningful participation by those who have borne the costs of the conflict.

For this reason, we support the establishment of a formal Congo Working Group within Congress, accompanied by a predictable framework for sustained civil society engagement. This could include thematic areas focused on civilian protection and assistance, justice and accountability, and the advancement of sustainable and responsible mineral partnerships, supported by dedicated resources to ensure participation is operational rather than symbolic.

Thank you for your attention.