A/HRC/41/54 women. As a consequence, women are relegated to positions such as catering and maid services in the oil compounds, but even these positions require previous experience or other qualifications. Local women who have spent their lives working in the agricultural industry are thus disadvantaged from securing these roles as well. 115 64. The Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences reported that extractive industries had led to increased sexual violence against women (A/HRC/23/49/Add.2, paras. 48–50). 116 While on mission to Papua New Guinea, she received reports that the influx of extractive industries employees (most of whom were men) into poor and isolated communities had resulted in increased cases of sexual exploitation and abuse of women. 117 The expanding extractive industries strained policing resources, especially because the focus on the mines drew police away from the villages. 118 This shift in resources left isolated villages unequipped to respond adequately to calls for help. 119 Accordingly, the presence of an extractive site can present a danger to the enjoyment of human rights by indigenous, Afrodescendent and other historically racially/ethnically discriminated against women, by increasing the likelihood of violence and decreasing governmental protection.120 VI. Recommendations: incorporating racial equality and nondiscrimination obligations and principles in reform, regulation and assessment of the extractivist economy 65. Substance over form: States, multilateral actors and transnational corporations must anchor governance, oversight and evaluation of the extractivism economy in the principles of sovereign equality, the right to self-determination of all peoples and the right to development. There is a complex governance regime that exists in the extractivism economy, and within the human rights framework, this centrally includes the business and human rights regime anchored in the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework. Global, regional and national initiatives to guarantee human rights protections in the extractivism economy must ensure that they account for the global structural racial inequality that is rooted in persisting sovereign inequality as discussed in the present report. This means that corporate due diligence, State and corporate transparency and duties to consult and ensure prior, informed consent must all be evaluated against a substantive benchmark of how well they promote selfdetermination, development and sovereign equality. Procedural mechanisms should not be untethered from the substantive norms these mechanisms are designed to serve. Furthermore, States in the global South must take seriously their sovereign responsibilities to ensure the permanent sovereignty over natural resources of their peoples by rejecting corrupt practices and undue foreign intervention. Powerful States – including those that have yet fully to reckon with their colonial extractivism legacies – must commit to undoing the structures of subordination and inequality that persist. In addition, human rights actors within the global system and elsewhere must ensure that all of their work meaningfully confronts global structural racial inequality in the extractivism economy 66. No should mean no: permanent sovereignty over natural resources should be understood to include the right of peoples, especially those most negatively affected by the extractivism economy, to say no to extractivism, its processes and its logics. State 115 116 117 118 119 120 Ibid., p. 24. See also Rebecca Adamson, “Vulnerabilities of women in extractive industries”, Indian Journal of Women and Social Change, vol. 2, No. 1; and https://womin.org.za/images/papers/paper-five.pdf, p. 18. Adamson, “Vulnerabilities of women in extractive industries”, p. 24. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. 19