Guest's blog

The following post was written by Karl, a volunteer English teacher at the Health and Earth Rights Training (HEART) program in Mae Sot, Thailand, on the Burma border.

After arriving in Mae Sot, I found myself sitting in a small restaurant eating very spicy chicken and rice and feeling the most excited and grateful that I can remember. Soon I would be starting my volunteer position and I couldn’t wait. I wanted a real “immersion” experience in Burma's culture and this is certainly what I was heading for. Little did I know what was in store…

My volunteer placement is at the HEART school, which stands for Health and Earth Rights Training. The school’s focus is on health education, human rights and the environment, but gender equality, woman’s rights and many other subjects are also part of the seven and a half month course.

There are 17 students, the majority in their early 20s and one in his late 30s. About half of the students have been living in refugee camps while most of the others come from various organizations based in and around Mae Sot and as far as Chiang Mai. 

The HEART school

As part of learning English, the students write 10 pages every week in a journal about anything they choose. Most write about their families, friends and people they have left behind. I read their journals every week to correct the grammar and it is a reminder to me of where the students have come from and what is important to them. The most consistent themes are a desire to make a difference in their home village and help the ethnic groups still living there. The students write about deforestation, health and human rights issues, and almost every other problem that is reported throughout Burma and in each student’s community.

The day after SCOTUS ordered the expansion and reargument of Kiobel, I sat in a coffee shop with a friend (and fellow law student) reading the New York Times. As I read through an article about the case, which gave a bare-bones account of the summary of the issues and the March 6 decision, I parroted the facts to my companion: “Unbelievable! They want to know whether US courts can even hear cases alleging human rights abuse abroad! This shouldn’t even be an issue!”

To my great dismay, instead of sharing my outrage, my friend simply responded, “Well, why should US courts be allowed to hear cases between two foreign parties for abuses committed abroad?”

At the time, I stammered through an argument about providing remedies and upholding international human rights norms, but I admit that at the time I could not provide the legal analysis he was looking for. A first year law student too often buried in my Property and Civil Procedure textbooks, I rarely found the time to immerse myself in the issues that sent me to law school in the first place. Thankfully, my summer legal internship has quickly corrected this.

Last week, the EarthRights office was abuzz as we put the finishing touches on own amicus brief in support of Esther Kiobel and her co-plaintiffs, and helped our allies finalize three other briefs. While I can’t take credit for piecing together any of the substance that will hopefully convince SCOTUS to rule in favor of corporate liability, working alongside those who did was definitely a far cry from my experience in March, when my head was stuck in my Property book. The process was demanding, and tedious at times, but the experience was invaluable and the gravity of the Kiobel case constantly drove our work forward.

This guest post was contributed by Emily Ponder, a legal intern in our US office. Emily is a first-year law student at the University of Virginia School of Law.

Everyone knows that oil is a dirty business, but tar sands oil may be the dirtiest. That is why environmentalists, indigenous groups, and small-town Nebraska famers alike are celebrating President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline Jan. 18.

The tar sand oil extraction process and its transport poses serious health and environmental hazards, and the Keystone XL pipeline would have made 2,000 miles of land—and communities—vulnerable to its destructive risks.

The energy-intensive process of extracting tar sands emits three times more carbon dioxide emissions three times higher than the extraction of conventional oil. [Edit: As noted in the comments, this refers only to emissions during extraction, which is a small percentage of total emissions. However, because of these high extraction emissions, the "well-to-wheels" emissions of Canadian tar sands are still the highest of US oil sources, 16.5% higher than the baseline and 22% higher than domestic crude oil.] What’s more, extraction of the tar sands oil in Canada, at the head of the pipeline, poisons water downstream with chemicals such as cyanide and anomia. Indigenous communities downstream from extraction sites in Alberta have seen an increase in rare cancer, renal failure, lupus, and hyperthyroidism.

At the other end, refineries in Texas would have increased air pollution, making communities vulnerable to respiratory problems and lung disease, not to mention high levels of smog and acid rain.

This guest post comes from Matthew Allen, or "Teacher Matt," a teacher at the Health and EarthRights Training program (HEART). HEART, one of our partner schools, is a collaboration between ERI and Dr. Cynthia Muang, and early this month celebrated the graduation of its first class of students.

I was lucky enough to arrive at the HEART site shortly after construction started. On the back of his motorbike, the program’s coordinator drove me out of the dusty town of Mae Sot along a dirt track through endless fields.

After 15 minutes of dodging potholes, we arrived at the training center. The site is surrounded by sugar cane and rice fields as far as the eye can see, framed by the mountains of Burma and Thailand, and in the beginning of the hot season the sunsets are spectacular.

In the far corner of the campus was a large roof made of huge dry leaves over a hole in the ground – the foundation of the unfinished school. In the week before our opening ceremony, half the students arrived to help finish the school, constructing walls, blinds, and pathways complete with handrails.

The students at HEART have to work extremely hard throughout their time in the program. They bathe, do their chores and eat breakfast in time for morning lessons, take an hour break for lunch and return to class until 4pm. After dinner, they do their laundry and have almost an hour to play sports until their two-hour English lesson at 7pm, followed by nightly homework.

I don’t know how, but some students still found time and energy to read for pleasure at the end of the day.

Their determination, playfulness and optimism were a constant source of inspiration to me, especially as I learned more about their difficult pasts. Many of the students had been denied education, abandoned by their parents and supported themselves by picking and selling vegetables or flowers at young ages. My students would always reminisce about how much they love their home, but the stories would often end with how their villages had been raided and burned down by Burma’s military. Close family members were killed or raped, and many of the students had to hide in the thick jungles of the Karen state until it was safe to rebuild their lives.

Shortly after arriving in Thailand this summer, I was dispatched to Kho-ha, a small village in southern Thailand’s Songkhla province, to write a legal memorandum regarding a local mine blasting and causation lawsuit.

For the past several years, Khu-ha has been the scene of a struggle between a socially aware community group and a powerful Thai mining company.  Khu-ha is situated at the base of a large lime-stone mountain called Khoa Khu-ha—a mountain that has been one of Khu-ha’s symbols for centuries, as well as the source of fresh stream water for the village and home to lush greenery and a high number of bats that inhabit its many caves.  

Khoa Khu-ha also happens to be located on a large swathe of public land that the Thai government leased a few years ago to the mining company.  Since that time, the village of Khu-ha has not been the same. As soon as the mining company set up shop, it began blowing up Khao Khu-ha with large quantities of dynamite to extract the limestone.  I arrived in Khu-ha to see a mountain with a gaping crater, the entire center blown away.

A community in jeopardy

But the community of Khu-ha’s injuries aren’t limited to the destruction of their precious Khao Khu-ha.  Many people have suffered property damage from the close-range blasts, health problems due to the mine dust, loss of livelihoods from the mine activities, and loss of the general sense of security that they used to have before the massive explosions began launching dust, large stones, and loud booming blasts into the atmosphere on a daily basis.  

One family owns a duck farm, and as soon as the explosions began, their ducks stopped producing eggs—wiping out their family income.  Another family's house is falling apart, its foundation cracked by the constant explosions, and the family now lives in a home of cracked walls, damaged floors, and bursting water pipes.

This guest post comes from Nina Tandon, a recent graduate of Boston University School of Law and the Fletcher School who is currently a legal fellow in ERI’s office in Washington, DC.

Legal liability for climate change impacts, long a goal of environmental activists, is inching its way onto the radar screen for important players in our world economy – insurance companies and, perhaps, even nation-states. 

Who should pay in climate change lawsuits - the corporations or their insurance?

Earlier this month, the Virginia Supreme Court handed down a decision that freed insurance companies from the responsibility for paying their insured clients for climate change-related damage, particularly when the gas emissions are foreseen consequences of the insured’s intentional acts. In plain English, what this means is that companies that emit greenhouse gases in the regular course of their operations (like electric companies) won’t be able to collect from their insurance companies in the event that they are sued for damage caused by the gas emissions.

The case, AES Corp. v. Steadfast Ins. Co., considered whether the Steadfast Insurance Company is responsible for defending its client, AES, against lawsuits related to AES’s greenhouse gas emissions. In a separate and ongoing case, citizens of Kivalina, Alaska, have sued AES, an electric company, over the harmful environmental effects of AES’ emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The court held that because the greenhouse gas emissions were a “natural and probable consequence” of AES’ intentional acts, the emissions did not qualify as an “accident” that would be covered under the terms of the insurance agreement between AES and Steadfast. In other words, AES has to defend and pay any damages itself.

Although the state supreme court’s decision isn’t binding on the courts of other states and does not affect federal law, precedent begets precedent in the U.S. legal system, and this case will be looked to for guidance on the issue. Insurance companies may breathe a collective sigh of relief at the ruling, but the door remains open for greenhouse gas emitters to be held liable for the environmental harm caused by their emissions.

Nearly a million businesses have their legal home in Delaware, including more than 60 percent of the Fortune 500. The Delaware General Corporation Law and the state’s Court of Chancery are known worldwide for their pro-business approaches to corporate law. Delaware is unique in the United States because its Court of Chancery is modeled on England’s Court of Chancery, and handles matters of equity instead of legal issues, does not have juries, and focuses on commercial cases.

As many U.S. corporations enjoy the favorable legal climate in Delaware, civil society members and developing countries’ citizens have accused some of these corporations of human rights and environmental abuses abroad. From instances of oil pollution in Peru to child slave labor in the Ivory Coast, U.S. corporations have been accused of benefiting from weak environmental and social policies in developing states. For example, the United Nations (UN) has reported that in 2008, the top 3,000 global companies created $2.2 trillion in annual environmental damage.

Under federal law, foreign plaintiffs may sue U.S. corporations for harmful overseas activities in U.S. courts. Yet, transnational tort cases that do not necessarily involve allegations of genocide, slavery, or torture often face an early possibility of dismissal based upon forum non conveniens grounds, such as happened in the litigation over Chevron’s pollution in Ecuador. Forum non conveniens is an option available to the defense where it can argue that there is an alternative court that is adequate to hear the case. Often times, dismissal based on forum non conveniens is a death knell to foreign plaintiffs’ claims who face a plethora of jurisdictional, procedural, and practical challenges in their home courts. 

Yesterday news broke that the Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), the UK/Dutch oil giant’s Nigerian subsidiary, admitted responsibility for two catastrophic oil spills in the Bodo region of Ogoniland in the Niger Delta in Nigeria. Today the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) released the most comprehensive study detailing the devastating environmental impacts of oil production on Ogoniland. Taken together, the report and admission of responsibility by Shell are powerful reminders of the crippling effect the oil industry continues to have on the Delta’s economy and environment, particularly on local communities that rely on the land and water for their survival.

Extensive oil spills devastate resources in the Niger Delta

In August and December 2008, two wellheads owned by SPDC sprang leaks spewing 14,000 tons of crude oil into the region’s waterways, devastating water, food, and fuel resources. People in the community say that in each instance, the wellheads were not capped until they had been spewing oil for over three months, even though Shell representatives admit they had been aware of the leaks for several weeks.

This guest post comes from Evan, an intern with ERI’s Burma Alumni Program, who recently spent two weeks living at the Social Development Center (SDC), on the Thai-Burma border, where he taught research and report writing. The SDC was founded by alumni from the EarthRights School Burma and has been training human rights and environmental defenders since 2003.

I recently had the privilege of teaching for two weeks in a village in Mae Hong Sorn Province. Initially, I was off-put by the small village (“it’s rustic!” I wrote, facetiously, to my friends in Chiang Mai), and I also had my reservations about the work, worrying about how the students would view me and whether I could communicate with them effectively, in English.

After just a few days, however, these initial concerns vanished and were replaced with a new concern: spending as much time with the students as possible, without crowding their demanding schedules. Getting to know the students was an enormous pleasure – I loved learning about their backgrounds, and the stories that preceded their lives in the camp and school.  More than once I found myself up late, long past the village bedtime, chatting with students and neighbors. I also learned, through my new friendships, that I am terrible at table tennis, incapable of doing backflips off rocks near the waterfall, and my Burmese pronunciation is… lacking.

When the weekend came, and I went into town for laundry and other errands, I found the first opportunity I could to run back to the village in order to hang out a little longer with the students. When it came time to leave, after the second week, saying goodbye was a lot tougher than I ever imagined.  We promised that we would stay in contact through e-mail and Facebook, one student climbed a palm tree to get a coconut for me, and though I tried to restrain my own emotions I had trouble getting away from the hugs and well wishes in time to catch my bus back to Chiang Mai.

I’ve always heard teachers claim to get more from their students than they give. While I have a year of teaching under my belt, I’d never actually felt that way myself… but after just two weeks of exposure to the village and the awesome SDC students, I finally understood what they meant.

This guest post comes from Yewande Ajoke Agboola, a law student at University of Maryland School of Law currently interning with our campaigns team in Washington DC.

The Robert Murdoch News of the World police bribery and phone hacking scandal continues to evolve with the arrest and resignation of the company’s former editor this weekend and the resignation of the head of Scotland Yard on Sunday. In addition to resignations, there will be a hearing before British lawmakers investigating the allegations that is set to include Murdoch, his son, and the former editor today. With sordid new details emerging daily (including reports that employees or associates attempted to hack into phone conversations and voice mail of September 11 survivors, victims and their families) British and U.S. law enforcement investigations have begun and an important U.S. law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), is receiving renewed attention.

The FCPA makes it illegal for U.S.-listed companies, their employees or agents to make bribes to foreign officials. In this case, the Act may lead to liability for News of the World’s U.S. parent, News Corporation if News of the World was involved in the bribery scheme. The FCPA has not only punished companies that have bribed foreign officials to the tune of around  $2 billion in fines in the last two years, but the threat of criminal fines and penalties has changed business practices for the better around the globe.