Petroleum Africa
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Wednesday, September 7, 2005
One project in Africa involving US companies is side-stepping human rights safeguards, a statement from Amnesty International said. According to the NGO the oil pipeline in Chad and Cameroon is aiding in the governments of these two countries to ignore its poor farmers and fisherman, whose lives will ultimately be affected by the pipeline.
The London-based rights group said "The investment agreements governing the project risk seriously undermining the ability and willingness of Chad and Cameroon to protect their citizens’ human rights, making the oil companies de facto unaccountable in the pipeline zone," Amnesty International UK’s legal adviser Andrea Shemberg said.
Amnesty released the statement to mark the launch of a 54-page report entitled "Contracting out of Human Rights: The Chad-Cameroon pipeline project". The 620-mile pipeline, which links Chad’s oil-producing Doba region to Cameroon’s Atlantic coast, began pumping oil in 2003. According to the pipeline project’s Web site, www.essochad.com, production was averaging about 180,000 barrels of crude oil per day by the end of the second quarter.
The pipeline had transported a total of nearly 103 million barrels of oil by then, and, as a result, more than $276 million in oil revenues had been paid to the government of Chad, it added.
The project is viewed by many rights activists as a test case of whether petrodollars can fight poverty in Africa instead of fuelling conflict and corruption. But according to Amnesty International the agreements governing the project created "financial disincentives" to the protection of human rights. It said the construction and operation accords could carry large financial penalties for the host governments if they interrupted the running of the oil pipeline or oil fields to try to protect local people’s rights.
"This makes it extremely difficult for Chad and Cameroon to take action against company malpractice, and for individuals adversely affected by the pipeline to obtain redress," it said.
Amnesty added the project had already led to allegations by poor farmers in the region that they had been unfairly denied access to their land, without compensation. Some local villages had been blocked from their safe water supplies.
"The Exxon Mobil-led consortium and the governments of Chad and Cameroon must amend the agreements immediately to ensure human rights are protected in these countries." Shemberg said.
None of the companies involved in the pipeline cared to comment on the report. The project is led by ExxonMobil and also involves Chevron Corp. as well as Malaysia’s state-owned firm, Petronas.
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