SOCIAL TOPICS (Archive): ENVIRONMENT

Published, March 1996

       by Victor M. Sher

       Many people think of human rights and environmental quality as separate concerns. In fact, they frequently overlap.

       Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian playwright and activist who was executed in November 1995, joins a tragic and growing list of environmental martyrs who have died for defying environmentally destructive activities that violate human rights. Indeed, all across the globe, human rights to life, security, and health, among others, are threatened by projects and activities that do grave violence to the environment.

       There are at least two reactions growing across the world. One is an attempt to strengthen international laws and institutions to protect what are sometimes called “environmental human rights.” The other, closely related to the first, is an insistence on the part of consumers and investors that private companies be held responsible—legally and financially—for the results of their activities, whether intended or not.

       In Nigeria, Royal Dutch Shell, in collaboration with what passes for a government there, has sucked the crude oil from beneath Saro-Wiwa’s Ogoniland, leaving behind death, disease, poverty, and destruction. Mr. Saro-Wiwa urged his countrymen to get organized and resist. His government arrested him and eight others on trumped-up charges and executed all nine over the loud objections of much of the world. Shell was mortified, of course, but disclaimed responsibility. That’s not good enough, said people who cut up their credit cards and became former Shell customers.

       Union Carbide was even more brazen in its reaction to the catastrophe in Bhopal, India, where the explosion of a Carbide chemical plant killed around 3,500 people and maimed as many as 150,000 more. Carbide expressed regret, but put its real effort into a costly legal battle to evade paying just compensation to the survivors. As a result, Carbide now faces demands in the U.S. that its corporate charter be revoked.

       Partly owing to the increase in violence against those who would protect human health and the environment from callous companies and governments, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights is debating proposals that could make such tragedies less likely to recur.

       Various U.N. bodies have studied the matter for five-plus years. Their conclusion: a safe, healthful, secure environment is already protected as a basic human right through scores of treaties, conventions, and other documents, both national and international. What’s needed is a mechanism to enforce those laws.

       Indeed, those who argue that protection of the environment means less protection for people (a frightening majority of the Congress takes more or less that view) have it backwards. You can’t have well-protected human rights without strong environmental protections; you won’t have a sustainable environment without strong protection for human rights.

       It seems pretty elementary. One reason the U.N. undertook its investigation of the linkage between human rights and the environment in the first place is that human rights law is more developed than international environmental laws in this crucial respect: international human rights bodies have established procedures by which individuals can lodge complaints—even against their own governments. No parallel structure exists in any international environmental organization. And the organizations empowered to hear violations of human rights also have powers, limited though they may be, to demand relief from the government violating human rights—or permitting violations by private companies.

       So a pincer attack is being mounted against businesses that think their sole responsibility is to make money regardless of the cost to people or the environment: law reform on the one hand, economic pressure in the form of loss of sales and investments—even stockholder revolutions—on the other. A powerful combination.

Victor M. Sher is President of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (SCLDF), a nonprofit, public-interest environmental law firm. USTC has worked with SCLDF and other clients on filing environmental shareholder resolutions with portfolio companies for the past two years. For further information on SCLDF’s activities, write to Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, 180 Montgomery Street, Suite 1400, San Francisco, CA 94104. SCLDF is not part of the Sierra Club.