This dissertation analyzes the Bergama social movement, which arose in Turkey in the 1990s as local resistance to gold mining by a transnational corporation supported by the national government. Facing these antagonists, the local struggle lead to the establishment of a transnational advocacy network. In order to defy double standards in the activities of transnational corporations and financing agencies, which threaten the livelihoods of subaltern groups, the network appealed to both environmental and human rights norms on behalf of environmental justice. Such a strategy involves the framing process by collective actors of a language of new rights. Thus, the dissertation examines the processes of transnational contention that allowed the movement to gain access to European supranational institutions - the European Parliament, the European Commission, and the European Court of Human Rights. The response of these institutions to the movement`s demands is examined, as well as the impacts of their interventions, particularly so as to evaluate the limits and potential of a rights-based strategy for groups disproportionately affected by environmental degradation. The case reveals how difficult it is to demand respect for European standards at the margins of the modern/colonial world-system, where the heaviest polluting activity is to be found, and states are more vulnerable to the pressures of global capitalism. Furthermore, it shows how local, regional and global processes are inextricably interwoven, hence the impossibility to make a clear-cut distinction between domestic and international politics amidst the entanglement of intra-, trans- and international relations, all permeated with the coloniality of power.