Hold Shell accountable for oil spills, AI tells FG

Adelani Adepegba, Abuja..PUNCH

Amnesty International has asked the Federal Government to hold Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Ltd., accountable for oil spills in the Niger Delta.
The human rights group said the FG is failing to fulfill its duty to protect the rights of the people living in the Niger Delta, including making sure they enjoy their right to a remedy and proper clean up of oil spills.

Presenting the report, “Clean it up: Shell’s alleged false claims about oil spills response in Niger Delta,” on Tuesday in Abuja, AI Business and Human Rights Researcher, Mark Dummett said Shell had a responsibility to ensure that its actions did not cause or contribute to human rights violations.
The report which was published to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1995 execution of environmental activist and writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa, documents the failure of the government to regulate the oil industry as well as the inability of its watchdog, the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency to police the oil industry effectively.
It noted that in 2011, the United Nations Environmental Programme  exposed massive levels of pollution caused by oil spills from Shell pipelines in the Ogoniland region of the Niger Delta, adding that in response, Shell promised to clean up the sites identified by UNEP and improve its response to future spills.
“Yet in field investigations at four of the spill sites UNEP identified as highly polluted in 2011, Amnesty International and the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and development found all four remain visibly contaminated in 2015, though Shell says it has cleaned them; the investigation demonstrates this is due to inadequate clean-up, not new oil spills,” the report stated.
At one of the spills locations, Shell’s Bomu Well 11, AI said its researchers found blackened soil and layers of oil on the water, 45 years after an oil spill took place, “even though Shell claimed to had cleaned it up twice in 1975, and 2021.”
AI insisted that Shell must heed the advice of the UN’s experts, by changing its approach to oil spill remediation and begin to clean up properly.