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When Karen villagers in Chiang Mai’s Omkoi district discovered a coal mine had been approved close to their homes, they had no land titles and no legal experience. They went to court anyway.
Omkoi, Chiang Mai – Pornchita Faprathanphai grew up catching shrimp in the streams above her village and collecting vegetables from the family’s fields. Life in Kaboedin, tucked into the forested mountains of Chiang Mai’s Omkoi district, moved to its own rhythms – the rice harvest, the planting seasons, the forest ceremonies that marked time for the Karen people who have lived here for generations.
In April 2019, a government notice put all of that at risk. A coal mine had been in the works for nearly twenty years. The community was learning about it for the first time.
“They told us that if we disagreed with the project we could submit a complaint letter to the Damrongtham Centre or file it at the district office, and that would be the end of it,” Pornchita said. “We never thought it would drag on this long.”
What followed was seven years of protests, lawsuits, and counter-research, a dispute that then reached Thailand’s highest administrative court. On 13 February, the court upheld a temporary injunction suspending the mine’s environmental approval, effectively halting the project until a final verdict is issued.
The ruling rejected an appeal by 99 Thuwanon Co. Ltd., the company behind the mine, against an earlier 2022 injunction. The company has not commented publicly.
The case is still open. But it raises a question worth examining: how did a remote Karen village, with no formal land titles and little prior experience of the courts, manage to bring a long-planned mining project to a standstill – at least for now?
A mine two decades in the making
The project’s origins stretch back to 2000, when 99 Thuwanon applied for a concession to mine lignite, a low-grade form of coal, across roughly 45 hectares of land in and around Kaboedin.
A government expert committee approved the project’s environmental impact assessment (EIA) in 2011 and reaffirmed that approval in December 2020.
The mine, estimated to hold around 720,000 tonnes of coal, was intended to supply a cement facility in Lampang province, according to the EIA. Kaboedin’s residents said they knew nothing about any of it.
When news reached the community in 2019, residents moved fast. They formed the Omkoi Anti-Coal Mine Network, and began organising. A government-organised public hearing drew an estimated 3,000 people, and had to be postponed.
Fighting back with paperwork
The community dug into the paperwork. Residents and their NGO allies began examining the official EIA and found what they said were serious flaws. Community members whose names appeared in the document as hearing participants said they had never attended.
Locals petitioned the National Human Rights Commission, which opened an investigation. It found procedural violations in the EIA’s public hearing process and recommended the assessment be revised.
In April 2022, fifty village representatives marched to the Chiang Mai Administrative Court and filed suit against the Office of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy and Planning and the EIA expert committee, seeking full revocation of the assessment. Five months later, the court issued a temporary injunction freezing the project.
At the heart of the lawsuit was a document the community had compiled itself – a Community Health Impact Assessment that drew on villagers’ knowledge of their land to challenge the official EIA’s conclusions.
“We took the data from the EIA and looked at what didn’t match reality,” Pornchita said. “Then we invited the village elders to help check and fill in the gaps.”
The community’s report found that the mine would eliminate more than 40 farm plots, divert two irrigation streams, and consume up to 380,000 litres of water per day.
The official EIA told a different story. “The key point is that the EIA report describes the Omkoi area as wasteland,” said Manun Wongmasoh, a campaigner at Greenpeace Thailand. “But in reality, this is a watershed forest of critical ecological importance.”
Watchawalawee Kunboomreung, a lawyer at EnLAW, the environmental legal foundation representing the villagers, said the case required building the community’s world on paper. “Administrative cases are fought with documents,” she said. “We therefore have to paint as clear a picture as possible of the lives of the community for the court.”
What comes next
The injunction is not a verdict. The underlying lawsuit remains before the Chiang Mai Administrative Court, with no date set for a final ruling. Should the court ultimately find in the company’s favour, the project would likely be free to advance under its existing approvals.
Thanapol Phenrat, an environmental engineering specialist at Naresuan University, said the environmental risks associated with coal mining in watershed areas – acid drainage, toxic contamination – tend to accumulate over time and could affect water quality in the long term if poorly controlled. Technology can help manage them, he said, but at high cost and only with strict regulatory oversight.
It is a standard Thailand has not always met. At the Mae Moh coal mine in Lampang province, villagers spent twelve years in court before winning compensation in 2015 for respiratory illness caused by sulphur dioxide emissions from the state-owned mine and power plant next door.
Beyond the legal uncertainty, the project also faces headwinds from broader shifts in Thailand’s energy landscape. Mae Moh remains the country’s only operational lignite mine, and industrial lignite use has fallen sharply in recent years as existing mining concessions have expired. The government has set a net-zero emissions target of 2050, brought forward from 2065, and its incoming power development plan, PDP2026, is expected to reduce reliance on coal as part of the transition.
A life changed
For Pornchita, the abstractions of regulatory oversight and energy policy are less immediate than the streams she caught shrimp in as a child, the fields her family farmed, the community that shaped her – all of it sitting within the project boundary. She has spent the past seven years speaking about it on stages she never imagined she would stand on. “This is the turning point of my life,” she said. “I never once thought that in my lifetime I would have to fight something like this. Once I got involved in civil society work on the environment, and started learning about the warped structures of the system, it made me no longer a normal person. Anything that isn’t right, I have to speak up about.”
For her, the case comes down to something more fundamental. “We are not obstructing the development of the country,” she said. “But this development must not affect the environment or the way of life of the community. Because if it does, the community will always be the first to bear the risk.”
This story is part of a collaborative reporting project between HaRDstories and the Indigenous Media Network (IMN), supported by the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives.
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