Costa Rica Moves to Carve Crucitas Out of Its Own Mining Ban — the Deposit It Already Beat at ICSID

What happened

Bill 24.717, filed in November 2024, would authorise and regulate open-pit metallic mining inside the 84,800-hectare Cutris de San Carlos district while leaving Costa Rica's nationwide ban intact everywhere else. It sets a minimum 5% royalty on gross mineral sales, with more than 70% of revenue routed to the central government. President Laura Fernández, who took office on 8 May 2026, placed the bill on the Legislative Assembly's extraordinary-session agenda four days later. It has cleared committee and awaits a plenary debate, where four opposition factions holding 26 votes have lined up to defend the ban, though the main opposition party has withdrawn a large share of its delaying motions to let the bill move.

The legal backdrop hardened in March 2026. In ruling 2026-10560 of 20 March, the Constitutional Chamber (Sala IV) upheld an amparo and found that the ministries of the Presidency, Health, Public Security and Environment, plus the water utility AyA, had systematically neglected their duty to stop illegal gold mining at Crucitas. The court ordered urgent measures: a permanent police presence, tighter border control, and protection of water and health across a damaged area of roughly 30 square kilometres affecting about 15 communities, with mercury and arsenic contamination reaching toward the San Juan river on the Nicaraguan border. Costa Rica's open-pit ban dates to a 2010 executive decree and a 2011 legislative moratorium.

Why it matters for dispute formation

Crucitas is the rare deposit where the state already litigated and won. In Infinito Gold Ltd. v. Costa Rica the tribunal found Costa Rica had breached fair and equitable treatment through its 2011 moratorium, yet denied damages because the 2010 decree would have blocked an exploitation permit anyway and the mining rights were invalid from inception. So the deposit carries a precise legal fingerprint: a state measure that was wrongful in form but caused no compensable loss, over a title the tribunal treated as void. A carve-out law that reopens the same ground has to work on top of that record, not around it, and any new concession-holder takes a title whose predecessor was found invalid.

The sharper exposure sits where the statute meets the facts on the ground. The Supreme Court has ordered the state to clear illegal miners from a site the same government wants to hand to a licensed operator, so the entity that wins a Crucitas concession inherits active occupation, documented contamination and a court supervising the cleanup. That is a social-licence and enforcement problem before it is a mining problem, and it is exactly the ground on which the Infinito dispute was fought. For counsel, the work is to read Bill 24.717 for how it treats prior rights and prior findings, to price the risk that a reversed ban invites a new fair-and-equitable-treatment argument from a future investor if the policy swings back, and to treat the illegal-occupation overlay as a live liability that transfers with the title. Nothing here is legal advice; the point is that a statute can grant access to ore it cannot clear of history.

Who's exposed

What to watch

• Whether Bill 24.717 reaches a plenary vote and in what form, given the 26-vote opposition bloc and the withdrawn delaying motions.
• How the final text treats prior concessions, the Infinito record and the Sala IV order, and whether it addresses compensation or consistency for a reversed ban.
• Compliance with the March 2026 Supreme Court order: police presence, border control and remediation across the 30 square kilometres, and any contempt findings against the ministries.
• Whether any company signals interest in a Crucitas concession, and how it would take a title carrying an ICSID history and active illegal occupation.