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The Yadana Gas Pipeline Project is so far the largest foreign investment project in Burma. Transnational oil companies Unocal (US) and Total (France) have chosen to invest in a regime with one of the most deplorable human rights and environmental records in the world. Even worse, the companies have contracted with the SLORC army (the Tatmadaw) to provide security for the pipeline project. Thus, since before 1992, when the contract for the pipeline was signed, the Tatmadaw has engaged in a pattern of systematic human rights and environmental abuses as it seeks to fulfill its contractual responsibilities to Unocal and Total. Abuses such as extrajudicial killings, torture, rape and extortion by pipeline security forces have dramatically increased since that Yadana Project was initiated. The violations committed in furthurance of the pipeline project have included forced labor on the pipeline route, pipeline roads and company helipads; forced portering, whereby villagers are conscripted to carry arms and supplies for soldiers patrolling the pipeline route; forced relocation of entire villages to clear the way for the pipeline and provide ready pools of forced laborers; and massive forced labor on pipeline security barracks, camps and gates.

The influx of SLORC soldiers to a previously isolated region has also caused an increase in illegal hunting, logging, and wildlife trade. Tenasserim Division is one of the largest rainforest tracts left in mainland Southeast Asia, home to wild elephants, tigers, rhinos and great hornbills, to name a few of the rare and important species that inhabit this region. It is also the home to numerous indigenous peoples, including the Mon, Karen, and Tavoyan. These peoples are experiencing the negative impacts of the environmental destruction as well as the human rights abuses that they must regularly suffer at the hands of the army.

ERI has catalogued the human rights and environmental abuses associated with this project in two reports, Total Denial and Total Denial Continues. Additionally ERI also represented fourteen plaintiffs from the pipeline region in a groundbreaking lawsuit in US federal court. The case (Doe v. Unocal) was settled out of court in 2005; it represented the first time that a US court granted jurisdiction over a private corporation for human rights abuses committed in a foreign land.