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The following post was written by Van, an ERSM student from Vietnam.

Sawadee Ka.

The recent Red T-shirt demonstration in Thailand did not change my love to Thailand, because I have so many awesome Thai friends. Since I arrived in Chiang Mai, I have never felt regret.  

My trip with two other Vietnamese and then with two Burmese students gave me the feeling that I have known someone in advance and it was good. The first talk with other students at the EarthRights School Mekong (ERSM) was not that easy. It is my personality that I am quite uncomfortable surrounded by many unknown people. But at ERSM, that feeling had gone within a day after many ice-breaking activities.

Icebreakers at ERSM Orientation

I am very impressed with the ERSM alumni. I think they are a very good advertising about the school and the kind of people this school recruits. I received a lot of help from Long. And Si Phoung, simply with her smile, she tells me that she is my friend and she offers many help that I don’t know how I could do without her.

I believe that every single one of the student this year is trying their best to make the environment in this school warm and nice. Even though I don’t speak Thai, I can communicate with our cooks Pi Nok and Pi Pan and also other students. That is great.  

We, the thirteen students of the EarthRights School Burma (ERSB), Class of 2010, went to Ubon Ratchathani province, Northeastern Thailand to research and study about the Pak Mum Dam. The Pak Mum Dam is part of the Third Power System Development Project, which is located approximately 5.5 kilometers upstream from the confluence of the Mun and Mekong Rivers.

We started our trip on the 18th of April, 2010 with two mini vans. We ate breakfast, lunch and dinner along the way to Ubon province. On the way, something surprised us because before going to Ubon, we thought that the way to Northeastern Thailand would be very dry and hot. But when we saw a lot of trees along the road, we knew that our idea was wrong. That was incredible for us to see! We enjoyed our trip but we could not bear to sit in the van for 16 hours. We arrived at Pak Mum village at midnight. We all were tired.

The next morning we got the chance to meet and discuss with protestors against the dam and the members of the Assembly of the Poor (AOP) which is a community based organization that played a key role in the movement of trying to get the affected villagers’ rights and compensation from the government and the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT). We had a question and answer session between us and the community. It was quite an interesting meeting. We could learn about their struggles, commitments, livelihood, social and cultural practices and local ecology. We learned that the river communities value their environment and that their livelihood depends on the natural resources provided by Mun River. Also, their social and cultural practices are based on their environment.

After the Dam was built in 1991, local villagers were forced to relocate. The villagers had to earn their money in new places and they got a lower income. Many young people had to migrate to the cities to work. It had an effect on family structures and traditional practices. Most of the old people now have to live alone. Moreover, the dam caused severe ecological damage and consequently destroyed the villagers’ way of life and violated their rights to food, work, and culture. The Thai Government ignored the local people’s opinions. They decided without local people’s participation, which is very important for a successful and effective development project.

On May 24, I traveled to Houston, Texas, to join indigenous community leaders and earth rights activists from around the globe who are part of  The True Cost of Chevron Network. We came to Houston to attend Chevron’s annual shareholder meeting and speak directly to the company and its shareholders about the severe impacts this oil giant is causing to our people and our lands. We came to demand that Chevron improve its practices in our communities, and stop deceiving the public and its investors about the true cost of its operations.

Unfortunately, Chevron didn’t want its shareholders to hear about its complicity in human rights abuses and corruption, toxic pollution, environmentally dangerous practices, and other harmful activities around the globe.

Guillermo Grefa, an indigenous Kichwa leader from Ecuador, and Naing Htoo outside Chevron's Houston headquarters

Instead, Chevron viewed its annual meeting as a public relations opportunity; a time to tout its successes and pretend that it is a responsible corporate actor. To accomplish this deceit it tried to silence us, representatives of communities all over the globe affected by this company. Under threats of arrest, Chevron refused us entry into the shareholder meeting. All of us had valid legal proxies that granted us access to the meeting, but the company cared little.

The 1984 Bhopal gas leak was by most accounts the worst industrial disaster the world has ever seen.  There, a plant owned by Union Carbide’s Indian subsidiary released tons of highly toxic methyl isocyanate into the air above a crowed residential area. An estimated 4,000 people were killed, and an additional 11,000 people are estimated to have died of their injuries in subsequent years.  Untold thousands were injured. The victims have long waited for justice. 

Just this past Monday, a court in India convicted eight former employees of Union Carbide’s subsidiary of “death by negligence.”  The court sentenced those convicted to just two years in prison.  Not surprisingly, the victims are outraged that after so long, the punishment was so little.

But even that meager sentence was more than Union Carbide Corporation (UCC)  itself received.  In 1987, Indian authorities brought criminal charges of “culpable homicide” and “causing death by use of a dangerous instrumentality” against Union Carbide, an American company, and its former chairman Warren Anderson, for their roles in the disaster.  Yet, both UCC and Anderson have managed to avoid prosecution in India by literally becoming fugitives from justice. 

In 1992, the Chief Judicial Magistrate issued a warrant for Anderson and gave lawyers for UCC a month in which to appear for trial.  Neither appeared, and UCC’s official spokesperson stated that UCC would flatly refuse to submit to the jurisdiction of India’s criminal courts.  UCC simply ignored summonses served on them through the U.S. Department of Justice and Interpol.  So, on February 1, 1992, UCC and Anderson were declared “proclaimed absconders” by the Bhopal District Court.  UCC also fraudulently transferred all of its properties in India.  On April 30, 1992, the Bhopal District Court held that “the primary objective of Union Carbide, USA, in selling its properties [was] . . . so that prosecution against them, as directed by the Honorable Supreme Court [of India], cannot be carried out and criminal prosecution against them cannot proceed in this court.”   To date, neither Union Carbide nor Anderson have appeared to face the criminal charges pending against them in India.

A few weeks ago, I sat in on the Community Development class at EarthRights School Burma (ERSB). The class was facilitated by Mr. Benjamin D. Abadiano, a young hero for indigenous people in the Philippines and the president of the Assisi Development Foundation. According to his presentations during the class, the Assisi Foundation is helping hundreds of thousands of people adversely affected by the Philippines’ civil war to return home and rehabilitate their lives. Before he worked with the Assisi Foundation, he was working with poor communities in the Philippines, helping them establish community learning centers for young indigenous people. Currently, his community learning centers provide educational opportunities for hundreds of young indigenous people.  

After he graduated from Xavier University, he went to the indigenous communities with an exposure trip organized by a missionary group, and later he found himself happy there and decided to work for indigenous people in Mangyan communities. He started an education program for indigenous youth providing training in literacy, livelihoods and leadership. He started the program with little help from his friends in Manila and said, “the only thing at the time I had was my passion and blessing from God, and I am satisfied with it.”  

Mr Abadiano discusses alternative education with ERSB students

On May 28, 2010, in a procedurally bizarre and legally dubious move, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit dismissed a climate change lawsuit.  The court’s decision in Comer v. Murphy Oil deprives people of a remedy and a right to appeal when their lives and property have been damaged due to the destructive effects of climate change.  

In Comer, a group of property owners filed suit against dozens of oil, gas, and chemical companies, alleging that the greenhouse gas emissions from their industrial activities had helped change the climate in the Gulf of Mexico and amplified the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina.  The District Court dismissed the case, finding that the case raised political questions that were more appropriate for Executive Branch determination, and that plaintiffs had no standing to sue.  This ruling was reversed on appeal by a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit, which found that in the absence of federal guidance on the issue, normal tort principles could apply to the case.  Defendants asked the Fifth Circuit to rehear the case en banc – i.e. in front of a panel of all the appellate judges in the Circuit. 

Here’s where the procedural shenanigans begin.  In February, the Fifth Circuit voted to hear the case en banc, thereby instantly voiding the panel decision in favor of the plaintiffs.  Out of sixteen judges on the court, seven judges recused themselves due to conflicts of interest – presumably because they had some connection to or investment in one of the numerous major corporate defendants, which include both Exxon Mobil and BP.  The Fifth Circuit requires a quorum of nine judges to make en banc decisions; in other words, after the recusals, only a bare quorum remained to hear the case.  But before the en banc hearing, it was announced that one more judge needed to recuse herself, leaving the court without a quorum to hear the case. 

One year ago, on June 5th 2009, more than 30 people were killed in Peru’s northern Amazon province of Bagua when security forces violently clashed with indigenous protestors on a narrow strip of highway called “Devil’s Curve”. Early that morning, Peruvian security forces opened fire from helicopters into a crowd of several thousand protestors in an attempt to break through a road block, one of many throughout Peru’s vast Amazon region that indigenous communities had set up in protest to legislative decrees 1090 and 1064 that would have opened up the indigenous territories to increased mining, oil, natural gas and hydropower development.

I was in Lima during this time waiting to travel to the city of Iquitos in Peru’s northern Amazon to meet with local indigenous leaders, but my trip was delayed by the two months of protests leading up to the massacre at Bagua.  Transport into and out of the Amazon came to a standstill as communities barricaded roads, blocked waterways, and shut down an oil pipeline from lucrative Block 1AB deep in the northern Peruvian Amazon, in protest of the model of development being imposed by a government in faraway Lima.

As news of the massacre in Bagua spread, tensions rose and protests broke out in the rest of the country.  As I waited in Lima, I remember watching huge crowds gather in the center of the city to show their support for Amazonian communities, and watching security forces fire rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowds.

Amidst these protests, the Peruvian government charged Alberto Pizango, president of the national organization Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP in Spanish), with advocating revolt and sedition.  Fearing arrest, Alberto Pizango fled to the Nicaraguan embassy in Lima seeking asylum, which was granted the following day.  Later that night, with friends and colleagues from partner organizations Racimos de Ungurahui, Shinai, AIDESEP, and Amazon Watch, as well as actress and activist Q’orianka Kilcher, I took part in a candlelight vigil outside the Nicaraguan embassy to show our support for Alberto and the struggle of indigenous communities of Peru.

There have been two significant positive developments for human rights law at the U.S. Supreme Court in the past few days: the high court rejected an accused torturer's argument that he was protected by the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, and the U.S. government asked the court to decline to hear a case involving nonconsensual medical experimentation in a Nigerian drug trial.

First, the big news: the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Yousuf v. Samantar is a tremendous victory for efforts to hold human rights abusers accountable, and in particular for the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA), the organization that is litigating the case.  CJA represents victims of torture and extrajudicial killing in Somalia who sued Mohamed Ali Samantar, the former Somali Prime Minister and Defense Minister.  They sued under both the Alien Tort Statute and the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA).  Despite the fact that the TVPA specifically allows suits in U.S. courts for state-sponsored torture, Samantar argued that, because he had been a foreign official at the time, he was immune from suit under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA).

The FSIA is a law that defines the immunities of foreign governments in U.S. courts; it's the reason that ERI could not sue the Burmese military regime itself over the Yadana pipeline.  Even though nothing in the law states that foreign officials have immunity, some courts have still found that the FSIA applied to individuals in addition to governments.  But the Supreme Court unanimously rejected this interpretation, finding that the FSIA simply does not apply to individuals.

The decision does not mean that the case is over, however.  The Supreme Court did suggest that "common law" immunity--that is, immunity created not by a specific law, but by the courts themselves--might apply.  So the next battle will be to show the courts that gross violations of human rights should not be entitled to immunity under any interpretation.  This position was argued to the Supreme Court in an amicus brief prepared by Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic, which ERI signed.

Several like-minded NGOs met at the EarthRights School Mekong last week to discuss ways of mitigating potential harms from an economic venture between Burma’s oppressive military regime, the government of India, and others who are developing a project that threatens to create negative environmental and human rights issues for tens of thousands of people in Burma. As a new student intern with ERI, even I could recognize that this was only a new chapter in the longer story of harmful investments that exploit the natural richness of a land populated by many diverse ethnic groups.

The project, called "The Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project," is designed to bring greater trade access to north-eastern India by connecting the remote area to a newly improved seaport in the city of Sittwe in western Burma. There is a concern that this greater access will be delivered at the expense of 225km of the wild Kaladan river, and the human rights of its inhabitants. The river will have to be dredged to support barges which will run goods from the port to a new 120 km highway that will cut through Chin State of Burma and run to the Indian border at Mizoram State. The already marginalized people who happen to live in the vicinity will most likely be subject to forced labor, land confiscations, and other abuses by the Burmese Army, impacts commonly associated with the ruling generals’ brand of development. The project will require up to three years to complete, and was originally set to begin in mid 2010.

British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon rig has already spewed at least six, and maybe more than eleven million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Yet, according to New York Times, the Obama Administration has continued to grant permits and environmental waivers for drilling in the Gulf.  The Deepwater Horizon itself, of course, like many other Gulf rigs, had been granted a waiver from full environmental review.  If nothing else, the Deepwater Horizon tragedy has proven false the “Drill Baby Drill” crowd’s central conceit: that offshore oil drilling is safe. Yet the Obama Administration has not retracted its plan to drastically expand such drilling in US waters. In short, our policy-makers and regulators and have failed us.

Obviously, those who care about the environment and the people who live in it must pressure the Administration to drop plans to expand off-shore drilling and to tighten controls over ongoing drilling.  But that is hardly sufficient.  All oil, after all, must come from someone’s environment.  And given the inadequacy of our own government’s oversight of the oil industry, why would anyone think that officials in countries like Nigeria and Peru where a significant amount of our oil comes from, countries with less-well-developed regulatory regimes and a far higher incidence of corruption than ours, have either the will or capacity to protect their citizens and environment from the dangers of oil pollution?