Serbia's Institute for Transportation, CIP, is working on a project to relocate a part of the Valjevo-Loznica railway in the western part of the country, at the request of Rio Tinto, the company planning to mine lithium in the area but still has no permit for it, and a referendum on the issue is looming, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, has reported on Monday.

Initially, the track was supposed to pass over the Jadarite ore vain.

CIP confirmed to BIRN that it was working on several studies needed for the railroad track diversion.

The British-Australian company Rio Tinto has been present in Serbia since 2004 when an ore containing lithium was discovered.

In 2011, Rio Tinto signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the municipality of Loznica, while in 2017, it signed a similar document with Serbia’s Government. After that, a working group was formed to implement the ‘Jadar’ project, BIRN recalled.

It adds that due to the lack of transparency in negotiations between the Government and Rio Tinto, the possible detrimental impact on the environment and the company’s bad reputation in human rights violations, environmental disasters and corruption in countries around the world, Serbia\s NGOs, and some opposition parties show strong resistance to lithium mines.

This project started a mass „green“ resistance in Serbia in which numerous environmental associations and politicians, academics, experts… This project took people across the country to the streets, and petitions against the project are being signed, BIRN said.

It added that faced with strong resistance, President Aleksandar Vucic launched the idea of a referendum, seeing it, probably, as a solution to the problems that the Government and Rio Tinto had in their attempts to realise this project.

In the meantime, the Draft Law on Referendum, which is awaiting the Parliament procedure, envisages the abolition of the census for the required number of voters as a condition for the referendum’s success.

The Draft caused concern among the environmentalists, experts and opposition politicians who believed abolishing a census was a manoeuvre to pass the referendum.