Alliance of Solwara Warriors at their 2nd Strategic Meeting held in Namatanai, New Ireland Province, October 2023. Credit: West Coast Development Foundation.

PNG’s Supreme Court Just Told the Government It Can’t Hide Solwara 1’s Paper Trail

For nearly a decade, the fight over Solwara 1,  the world’s first deep sea mining project, in Papua New Guinea’s Bismarck Sea, has been fought on two fronts: on the frontlines with coastal communities defending their oceans across the Bismarck and Solomon Seas, and the legal front in PNG courts. This week, the legal front scored a decisive win.

On 9 September 2026, PNG’s Supreme Court dismissed an application by the Conservation and Environment Protection Authority (CEPA) that had tried to block the release of official Solwara 1 documents. The Court threw the case out for “want of prosecution” as CEPA simply didn’t show up to argue it, the court ordered the authority to pay the legal costs of Jonathan Mesulam and the other community representatives from the Alliance of Solwara Warriors who brought the case. 

This is a small procedural phrase with a big consequence: it reaffirms, once and for all, that Papua New Guineans have a constitutional right to see what their government is doing with their ocean.

What was actually being hidden

Since 2019, our partner the Centre for Environmental Law and Community Rights (CELCOR – Friends of the Earth PNG), has been in court on behalf of Jonathan Mesulam, Coordinator, Alliance of Solwara Warriors and fellow customary landowners from Namatanai District, New Ireland, demanding that two state agencies, CEPA and the Mineral Resources Authority (MRA),  hand over the documents underpinning Solwara 1: the mining licence, the environmental permit, and the communications that led regulators to approve them.

In 2024, the Supreme Court agreed with the communities and ordered both agencies to release the documents. What happened next is a case study in institutional stalling. MRA simply hasn’t complied. CEPA released a partial set and left out documents it claimed were “confidential”. They then appealed the 2024 order itself, rather than finishing the job. 

This month’s dismissal ends that appeal for good, and puts the original order back in force.

As CELCOR Executive Director Peter Bosip told ABC Radio Australia, the ruling closes off a strategy CELCOR has long suspected was really about something else: 

“It was just kind of a delay tactic by MRA and CEPA to suppress the customary landowners from challenging the decisions that were made” 

These are decisions CELCOR believes may not have followed proper process under PNG’s Mining Act, or basic requirements like free, prior and informed consent.

Why does a “procedural” ruling matters so much

Section 51 of Papua New Guinea’s Constitution guarantees every citizen “reasonable access to official documents.” It’s a strong right on paper, but rights on paper only bite when courts are willing to enforce them against agencies that would rather people didn’t look too closely.

This ruling does exactly that. As CELCOR put it in its media statement, the dismissal shows that “government bodies cannot use procedural delays to avoid fulfilling their constitutional obligations”.

This applies well beyond the Solwara 1 deep sea mining project.

For customary landowners anywhere in PNG facing a mining, logging, or fisheries project they weren’t properly consulted on, this is now settled law: state agencies holding documents about a project on your land have to produce them, and stalling isn’t a legitimate defence.

As CECLOR’s Peter Bosip put it, “all Papua New Guineans must know” that developers and the agencies backing them “will be held accountable for not complying to the court decision.”

The project this is really about

Solwara 1 has already failed once. Nautilus Minerals, the original developer, collapsed in 2019 after PNG’s government sank roughly USD 120 million into the venture. This was a loss Prime Minister James Marape called “a total failure,” built on technology “not proven anywhere.”

PNG declared a moratorium on deep sea mining the same year. And yet, under new ownership by Deep Sea Mining Finance, a project vessel was back working the same licence area in 2024, reportedly extracting seabed material and trialling extraction equipment under an environmental permit issued to a company that no longer exists. This is the very permit CEPA and MRA have been fighting to keep confidential.

CELCOR’s view is blunt: with the courts now clear that the public is entitled to see the full record, there’s nothing left to justify keeping Solwara 1 alive. 

“For deep sea mining, the Solwara 1 project — it’s a dead issue … The government should now cancel the mining licence.” – Peter Bosip, Executive Director, CELCOR.

What comes next

With CEPA’s appeal dismissed, the matter now returns to the National Court to be finished. This means CEPA and MRA are on the clock to release the outstanding documents in full, or face contempt of court. 

It’s a moment worth watching closely, and a genuine win for the Alliance of Solwara Warriors, CELCOR, and every Papua New Guinean who has spent years asking a simple question, “what’s actually in that permit?”, and who refuses to accept silence as the answer.

We’ve spent 15 years  standing with Pacific communities fighting to keep this industry out of the ocean before it starts. Transparency battles like this one rarely make headlines, but they’re exactly the kind of groundwork that makes the bigger fights winnable.

Congratulations to CELCOR, Jonathan Mesulam and the Alliance of Solwara Warriors, and everyone who kept this case alive.

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