I named an awful lot of issues and I named a lot of countries. All of those issues that I named and all of those countries that I named are cases that we work on, and have worked on, in MiningWatch for over 23 years. I will be detailing some of those in a brief that we will provide to this committee.
It's really difficult to say anything more about metrics, other than to say that year over year, we're finding the number of cases that are coming before us is relentless. These are new cases. These are cases of people being harmed this year or last year.
We had hoped in the more than 20 years that we've now been operating that we would see an improvement. This is almost a failing on our part. We feel sometimes that we haven't been able, through our work with communities and through our efforts to publicize these concerns, to raise them with the Canadian government and bring people to Canada to speak to parliamentarians and speak to civil servants. We had hoped that there would be more improvement, and there hasn't been. The problem is as big as it's ever been, and now with the coming mining boom, we're dreading how this is going to increase the workload even more. The workload is not the problem. The problem is the actual harm being done to people.
I want to emphasize that this is not just a few bad apples and it's not just the small companies that don't have any resources to pay to do things the right way. One of the companies we work on is Barrick Gold, which was sued in November last year in Canadian court. What was it for? It was for people who have been shot and killed by mine security and by police guarding Barrick's mine in Tanzania.
This is almost the biggest gold mining company in the world. I think it's now the second-biggest gold mining company in the world. It has plenty of resources to do things right. This is the third time that Barrick has been sued over these same issues at the same mine.
There was a court case filed in 2013 that was settled in 2015. There was another court case filed in 2020, which is ongoing in the U.K., and now there's been another case filed in Canada over the same issues of human rights abuses and excess use of force by mine security and police guarding the mine on behalf of Barrick.
So—