Environmental Rights Action, Amnesty International, and Friends of the Earth Europe have called for the immediate clean-up of Ogoniland in Nigeria, as it was stated should happen by a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
One year on from when the implementation of UNEPs report on Ogoniland was officially supposed to begin, the communities of the Niger Delta are still waiting for clean-up to start. Since the current President, Muhammadu Buhari was elected the governing structures for the UNEP implementation have been put in place and a coordinator was appointed to lead HYPREP, the implementation agency. But six years after publication of the UNEP Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland very little has happened to improve the situation:
- communities in Ogoniland are still waiting for clean-up and still waiting for the clean air, water, and land they need.
- only 1% of the promised funds have been made available: a reported $10m of the required $1billion budget has been transferred.
- Some communities where UNEP found contaminated drinking water wells have never received any alternative source of drinking water
- Shell continues to use the discredited RENA clean-up process, despite UNEP’s clear recommendation that the process was ineffective and should be discontinued.
- The company also says it has revisited 15 oil spill sites identified by UNEP, and carried out further remediation at 6 of those sites. But this is misleading because UNEP found contamination at more than 50 Shell locations.
- Meanwhile an Amnesty International investigation found that heavy contamination remained at 4 oil spill sites identified by UNEP, despite the fact remediation work had been carried out by Shell. [Link to AI investigation]
The UNEP report called for the implementation of emergency measures, the establishment of a $1 billion start up fund and extensive clean-up of Ogoniland.
