At ING's shareholder meeting last December, community leaders from the Jadar valley in Serbia delivered a message that should have stopped the room: "Stop treating us as your sacrifice zone." ING is one of several European banks financing Rio Tinto's Jadar lithium project, a deposit that would supply enough lithium for roughly 1 million EV batteries per year. The project also sits in a farming region whose residents were not meaningfully consulted before it was approved.
There is no confirmed EU lithium mine lawsuit that definitively proves a systemic sacrifice zone problem. Critics of the framing are right to note that. But the absence of a landmark court ruling does not mean the underlying dynamic is fictional. European banks collectively invest nearly €8 billion annually in critical minerals mining, including lithium, despite documented links to community displacement and environmental harm. The European Environmental Bureau filed a complaint with the European Ombudswoman on April 1, 2026, alleging maladministration by EU institutions. The legal architecture is catching up to the problem, even if it has not resolved it yet.
The Supply Chain the EU Chose Not to See
The EU's Critical Raw Materials Act, passed in 2023, targets 10% of annual lithium consumption from domestic extraction by 2030. That is a real policy goal with real engineering logic behind it: Europe cannot build 30 million EVs per year on supply chains routed through China. The problem is that the policy was written to secure supply, not to protect the communities sitting on top of it.
Serbia is not an EU member, which gives Brussels a convenient excuse. Jadar is technically outside EU jurisdiction. But ING, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, and Standard Chartered are not outside EU jurisdiction, and they received a petition on September 29, 2025, with zero public commitments in response. The banks are European. The financing is European. The demand for lithium is European. The accountability gap is a choice, not a geography problem.
The EU has also been rolling back sustainability disclosure rules under pressure from industry lobbying, which makes the timing worse. You cannot simultaneously weaken the rules that require banks to report on human rights risks in their portfolios and claim the green transition is being managed responsibly.
What Binding Actually Means
The honest tension in my own argument is this: lithium supply is not optional if you want to decarbonize road transport at scale. A 60 kWh battery pack requires roughly 8 to 10 kg of lithium carbonate equivalent. There is no near-term substitute at that energy density and cost. Blocking every mine on environmental grounds does not protect the climate; it just moves the extraction somewhere with weaker rules.
That is the fair point the mining industry makes, and it lands. But it does not follow that communities in the Jadar valley, or anywhere else, should absorb the costs of a transition they did not design and will not primarily benefit from. The question is not whether to mine. It is who decides, who is compensated, and what happens when the project causes harm.
The EU has a Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive that was supposed to answer those questions. It has been weakened twice since its original passage. Banks that ignored a formal petition in September 2025 are not going to self-regulate into accountability. The European Commission needs to restore mandatory due diligence requirements with real enforcement, not voluntary frameworks that let ING attend a shareholder meeting, hear "sacrifice zone" from the people affected, and do nothing.
Installed megawatts matter. So does who pays for them.
