At the end of June, the Supreme Administrative Court gave the go-ahead for the mining plans in Gállok/Kallak.
A month earlier, the UN agency Unesco visited the world heritage Laponia as they are worried about how a possible mine will affect the world heritage.
Mining in Kallak
Unesco demands that Sweden refrain from new decisions about Kallak
The municipal council: “I feel for the affected Sami villages”
Unesco recently had a world heritage meeting and there they demanded that Sweden refrain from making new decisions about the planned mine before the next Unesco meeting in 2025.
At the same time, the mining company Beowulf Mining is working with the environmental permit, which, however, is not expected to be completed this year.
The message from the mining company
Now Ed Bowie, at Beowulf’s headquarters in London, promises that no new decisions will be made.
“The UNESCO report is a prerequisite for the processing concession for Kallak and part of our application for an environmental permit that we intend to submit to the Environmental Court in 2025. The court will then examine our application, a process that is estimated to take two years. Therefore, we do not expect any decisions from the court or authorities before the next session of the World Heritage Committee”, he writes to NSD and concludes:
“We do not believe that the operation will have any direct impact on Laponia and any indirect effects will be very limited”.