Mass environmental justice uprising engulfs Damietta on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast
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Nov 15, 2011
The popular movement against a Canadian petrochemical plant has forced the Egyptian government to shut down the Agrium-Mopco gas-fertiliser factory, after residents shut down highways, bridges and a deepwater port, and battled the Egyptian military in the street. Grainy photos and video-clips tweeted out – especially by Al-Jazeera’s @Mansourtalk – show locals standing up to...
Own Up, Clean Up, Pay Up: Amnesty’s new report on Shell
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Nov 10, 2011
Amnesty International today demanded that Shell immediately pay $1 billion towards an initial clean up fund for the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta, a scheme recommended by the UN this August. A new report today published by Amnesty International and the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development (CEHRD) has called on Shell to...
A quick plug for our new (and beautiful) printed reports
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Nov 1, 2011
Counting the Cost, Platform’s new report on Shell Nigeria, is now available in print! Please buy your copy here. The report looks and feels incredible, thanks to our amazing designers at Ultimate Holding Company. Buying a copy of the report enables Platform to do more campaigning for human rights and corporate accountability in Nigeria. Your support...
TAKE ACTION: Demand corporate accountability
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Oct 22, 2011
The Global Greengrants Fund has set up an online petition calling on Shell to immediately clean up its appalling pollution in the Niger Delta and end its daily human rights abuses. The action has collected over 9,900 signatures since Wednesday. Let’s see if we can hit 10,000 by the end of today! Please sign the...
Shell hit with $1bn US lawsuit over Nigeria pollution
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Oct 21, 2011
Within a day of the US Supreme Court decision to hear the case of Kiobel v Shell, which accuses Shell of complicity in crimes against humanity and human rights abuses in Nigeria during the 1990s, the oil giant was hit by another class action lawsuit for 50 years of pollution in the Niger Delta. AFP...
Shell is abusing human rights in Nigeria. But who can stop them?
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Oct 17, 2011
This blog first appeared on Amnesty International UK’s new blog, Press Release Me, Let Me Go. We reproduce it here with these fantastic images from Environmental Rights Action, FoE Nigeria. Who can stop them? In the case of Shell in Nigeria this is a question well worth asking. Over the past few months, Shell’s appalling legacy of...
BBC interviews Platform over Shell’s human rights abuses
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Oct 7, 2011
Network Africa, the BBC World Service’s flagship programme broadcasting across the continent, interviewed Platform’s Ben Amunwa about the new report which implicates Shell in a decade of new human rights abuses in Nigeria. Shell declined to attend the interview. For more Platform podcasts, visit our page for the remember saro-wiwa project on podomatic.
Shell refuses to clean up devastating oil spills; cites “security”
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Oct 5, 2011
Al Jazeera reports that since Shell admitted liability for 2 major oil spills in Bodo after a lawsuit was filed against the oil giant in the High Court in London, the company has done nothing to clean up the extensive damage in the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta. While Shell cites ‘security issues’ as...
Sweet Crude: the movie
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Oct 5, 2011
“To an oil company, it’s liquid gold.” That’s how filmmaker Sandi Cioffi describes Nigerian oil, known as ‘sweet crude’ because it is low in sulphur and therefore cheaper and easier to refine. The trailer below is for Sweet Crude, the film. An amazing and insightful documentary by Sandi Cioffi, it looks at the appalling legacy of...
New blog: Shell’s impact on human rights in Nigeria
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Oct 5, 2011
In a new blog post on New Internationalist, Niger Delta activist Sokari Ekine provides a critical overview of Shell’s operations in Nigeria, including her first hand experiences in Rumuekpe, the town where Shell funded killings and militant clashes: This week a report by Platform London, ‘Counting the Cost’, found that between 2000 and 2010, Shell fuelled...
President Jonathan: ‘Our system has collapsed’
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Sep 29, 2011
In a speech to mark Nigeria’s 51st anniversary of independence from British colonial rule, President Goodluck Jonathan talked openly about how the systemic breakdown of government institutions in the ‘giant of Africa’. The Daily Trust reports: Jonathan said the country has been running on a deficit budget because the institutions that are supposed to protect public...
An abdication of responsibility
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Sep 15, 2011
When a government responds to one of the worst oil spills in its waters for a decade by appointing the former Chairman of Shell to advise on cutting regulation of the offshore oil and gas industry, something has clearly gone wrong. If the government wants to ramp up extraction from deeper waters but is unwilling to...
