EarthRights International released a new report, The Human Cost of Energy: Chevron’s Continuing Role in Financing Oppression and Profiting From Human Rights Abuses in Military-Ruled Burma (Myanmar), documenting Chevron’s ongoing role in financing and profiting from the military regime in Burma. This is the first comprehensive report on conditions in the Yadana pipeline region since Chevron acquired Unocal’s interest in 2005, and documents the continued serious human rights violations by pipeline security forces, including forced labor, murder, rape and torture. The report also describes Chevron’s continuing legal liability associated with abuses in the pipeline region. (See ERI's Press Release on the report.)

At a press conference on May 4, Indigenous communities from the Peruvian Amazon told Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) to clean up its toxic waste from their tropical rainforest or face a major lawsuit. The ultimatum, on the eve of the Westwood-based oil major’s annual general meeting for shareholders, came as a new technical report revealed that 30 years of Oxy’s polluting had left indigenous Achuar children with illegal concentrations of lead and cadmium in their blood, at levels known to cause permanent developmental problems.

At the recent 101st Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law, Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel Prize winning economist and former Vice President of the World Bank) delivered the keynote lecture on the topic of multinational corporations and their abuse of limited liability. Stiglitz said the power of multinationals is enormous and "they use that power to get special treatment; they try sometimes to make sure that environmental and health regulations are not enforced." He went on to call for the creation of an International Court of Commercial Claims and the extension of the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA.) “The current system is unfair to developing countries in the short run, but it is worse in the long run – because it undermines the rule of law. Click here to view a PowerPoint of his presentation.

| Read about ERI's efforts to Defend ATCA |