Amnesty International and the Center for Environment, Human Rights and Development in Nigeria has put to lie the multinational oil company, Shell’s claim that it has cleaned up four oil spill sites in the Niger Delta.
Oil pollution in the Ogoniland region of the Niger Delta is so severe the United Nations. Environmental Program said in a 2011 study that it will take decades to clean up.
Amnesty International said that it found “visible pollution” at four oil spill sites where Shell claimed to have cleaned up years ago.
“There were leaks, spills, in one case dating back to 1970, which have still not been cleaned up,” said Mark Dummett, the business and human rights researcher at Amnesty.
Shell was forced to stop extracting oil from Ogoniland in 1993 because of protests by local communities who said the drilling was causing too much pollution, but its pipelines still cross the region.
Of the four sites Amnesty investigated, two of the spills happened in Ogoniland in 2008 and 2009.
In a statement today, Shell said: “widespread theft and illegal refining of crude oil” continue to cause new spills and that it is committed to cleaning up all spills from its facilities, irrespective of cause.
On its website, Shell said that it has cleaned up all the sites in Ogoniland that were identified by the United Nations as polluted by its activities.
Amnesty’s Dummett said that many people cannot work because oil slicks have destroyed the fisheries and farmland the communities rely on for their livelihood.
Dummett said Shell is not the only one to blame for the lack of cleanup even as he took Nigeria’s oil spill regulators to task.
“One of the problems or one of the things that we found at three of the four sites that we investigated was that government regulators had actually certified the Shell cleanup, meaning they had ticked them, they had approved them, they said ‘Yes, Shell, you have cleaned them up to the regulatory standard,’” he said. [myad]
