The United Nations Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group on Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with respect to Human Rights (OEIGWG) was established on 26 June 2014 by the UN Human Rights Council. Its mandate is to “elaborate an international legally binding instrument to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises”. On...

[posted by Ucilia Wang on Climate Liability News, June 19th, 2018] The three Colorado communities that filed a climate liability lawsuit against ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy have added a conspiracy allegation to the complaint, which describes attempts by the two companies to deceive the public about the impact of fossil fuels on the climate. The amendment came two months after the city and county of Boulder, along with the County of...

[posted on The Conversation, June 4th, 2018]   Environmental justice activism is to this age what the workers’ movement was for the industrial age – one of the most influential social movements of its time. Yet, despite its consistent progress since the 1970s, environmental justice protests seem to get lost in the morass of information on broader environmental issues. In contrast, labour conflicts, including strikes and...

[posted by J Sam Daniel Stalin on NDTV, May 28th, 2018] In the village of 2,000, around 60 people have cancer and they blame the smelter, even though the state government has not carried out any specific study to identify the cause for cancer in high numbers among residents around the plant. In a village called Silverpuram in Tamil Nadu, 31-year-old Ram Lakshmi’s husband Murugan died of intestinal cancer three years ago....

It is illegal to set fire to someone’s house; we believe it is also illegal for fossil fuel companies to knowingly burn our common home. Today, the global call for climate justice is growing louder, Sara Shaw and Freek Bersch write   Twenty years ago, Shell made a prediction. In a scenario-planning exercise, the fossil fuel company prophesied a series of violent storms caused by catastrophic climate change would hit the east...

[posted by Chloe Farand on DesmogUK, June 18th, 2018]   One of the biggest corruption cases faced by the oil industry in recent years is due to resume in Milan on Wednesday as two of the world’s biggest oil companies Royal Dutch Shell and Italian firm Eni are facing trial. Prosecutors are bringing criminal charges against Shell and Eni executives over allegations of corruption regarding a $1.3 billion oil deal in Nigeria. This is the...