Environmental destruction and human rights in the Niger delta

The Niger Delta region has a rich and diverse flora and fauna: there are vast mangrove forests and a wide variety of animals that are specifically native to the particular ecosystem prevalent in that area. The oil in the region is being extracted, mostly by international companies, by way of drilling, a technique involving unavoidable oil spills and uncontrolled gas flaring. This alone, however, could be manageable, since there are guidelines that the international oil extracting companies operating in Nigeria have to observe. The Environmental Guidelines and Standards for the Petroleum Industry in Nigeria (EGASPIN), describe the rules to keep environmental pollution down to a minimum while extracting oil. However, in the past there have been several cases involving international corporations that did not observe those rules strictly enough, and situations in which environmental pollution was not cleaned up at all by the waste producer.2 Amnesty International describes © IRIN news FREEDOM FROM FEAR - March 2010 21 several examples in which international corporations have left oil spills unattended for weeks, even after the local population had made several complaints in that regard.3