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Shell ‘not honest’ about oil spill clean up in Nigeria
Royal Dutch Shell was on Tuesday accused of making false claims about the extent of its oil spill clean-up operations in Nigeria and urged to take more action to help worst-hit communities.
Amnesty International and the Center for Environment, Human Rights and Development (CEHRD) charged the oil major with failing to implement recommendations from a critical 2011 UN report.
The claims came a week before the 20th anniversary of the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, who helped bring the extent of oil-related ecological damage in Nigeria to world attention.
Wiwa and 8 community leaders from Nigeria’s southern Ogoniland were hanged on November 10, 1995 after being convicted at a secret trial of murdering four local chiefs. Nigeria’s then military government ignored pleas for clemency from world leaders.
Special vigils and protests outside Shell petrol stations were planned in the run-up to next week’s anniversary, Amnesty said.
But campaigners said communities in the creeks and marshes of Nigeria’s oil-producing southern delta region were facing the same problems Wiwa highlighted 2 decades ago.
“Twenty years; nothing has been done,” Fyneface Dumnamene Fyneface, a human rights and environmental activist from Port Harcourt, said in a statement. “Ogoniland is still polluted, no clean-up has been done, justice has not been achieved. Twenty years and what they fought for has not been addressed. That cannot continue.”
False Claims
Amnesty and the CEHRD’s claims come in a new report, “Clean It Up: Shell’s False Claims about Oil Spill Response in the Niger Delta“.
The document said most of the recommendations of a UN Environment Program (UNEP) report had not been implemented since its publication 5 years ago. Thirteen out of 15 areas visited between July and September this year were still “visibly polluted” or contaminated, despite claims to the contrary by Shell.
