NGO challenges EU on oil-human rights issue

The international NGO Christian Aid has challenged the European Union (EU) to tackle “the regulatory void” that allows European companies operate in the oil industry in Sudan, where they are allegedly complicit in human rights violations around the oilfields. In a couple of reports on 17 May, Christian Aid alleged that Sudanese government troops and pro-government militias were conducting rights abuses and depopulating oil concession areas to make way for oil production by European and other oil companies. While European companies were answerable only to their shareholders and could ignore human rights abuses, “people in the villages around the oilfields are being killed or thrown out of their homes by a government anxious to clear the way for oil to flow freely”, said Mark Curtis, the NGO’s head of policy.

Industry self-regulation and voluntary codes of behaviour were failing to address the issue, and political action from the EU was urgently required to press companies into suspending operations to avoid human rights abuses in the name of oil, Christian Aid stated. “The EU also needs to go further and immediately impose a temporary ban on investment in the Sudanese oil industry,” it added. If the EU was in any way serious about promoting human rights and development, then it had to seriously address the regulation of companies from within its member states, who were “implicitly helping finance a war which is systematically displacing and killing thousands of people”, according to the NGO. [http://www.christian-aid.org.uk/]