The North Gauteng High Court ruled in favour of the Amadiba Crisis Committee, which had been fighting against MRC's subsidiary Transword Energy and Mineral Resources obtaining mining rights to mine titanium in the village of Xolobeni on South Africa's south-west coast.
MRC was proposing openpit mining operatipns on 900 hectares of land, including wet separation plants, slimes dams, tailings dams and other required facilities.
Besides the area's natural beauty and the use of land for livestock grazing and crops, the community also did not want the company to mine on their ancestral land.
Judge Annali Basson cited the interim protection of informal rights to land act (IPILRA) 31 of 1996, saying the Xolobeni community could not be deprived of their land without their consent and they had the right to decide what happened with communally-owned land.
Government and companies will now have to obtain consent from the community before a mining right can be grated, even though this is not a criterion listed in the mineral and petroleum resources development act, which she said needed to be read with the IPILRA.
The DMR said in a statement it would study the judgment and would give its position on the matter thereafter.
Minister of mineral resources Gwede Mantashe said in a video posted on his Twitter that giving the community the right to consent rather than the right to be consulted in detail took away the government's right to grant mining rights.
"I can tell you, if that's the case, there will be no mining," he said.
Mantashe said the judgement also referred to negotiations about benefits to communities before mining could start.
"All commodities have cyclical behaviour. Now, if you hedge that right to benefit, that may be too costly to run mining," he said.