The Constitutional Court's four stages of prior consultation
- Social license and prior consultation
- Social license and prior consultation
- Audited
The doctrine consolidated in the Escobal judgment (Exp. 4785-2017, 3 September 2018): consultation is an obligation of the State (the Ministry of Energy and Mines, MEM), not of the company, and must follow four stages — (i) identification of the parties, (ii) pre-consultation with objective, understandable information, (iii) the consultation itself with the Human Rights Ombudsman (PDH) as observer, (iv) compliance with the agreements. Failure to comply voids licenses and triggers civil and criminal liability. The Constitutional Court (CC) framed it not as a barrier to industrial development but as a platform for equitable, intercultural, objective and transparent discussion.
The research is written in English; quoted figures, source names and the titles of legal instruments stay in the language their source published them in.
Sources
Related records
- The death of State-licensed projects in Guatemala
- Guatemala's ratification of ILO Convention 169 and its obligations
- Absence of a prior consultation law and Initiative 5450
- Over 100 community consultations without binding force
- The missing consultation law as an investor risk
- The 2005 Sipacapa consultation on the Marlin mine
This layer is research: read from public sources by the archive's own team, every claim cited with the date it was consulted, and audited where it is marked so. It has not entered the verified store — no figure here was fetched back from its source or stamped with a retrieval time — so it wears no red provenance numeral and never mixes with the verified figures.