In 1996, Nigerian villagers in Ogoniland filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York against Royal Dutch Shell, alleging complicity in torture, extrajudicial killings, and environmental devastation caused by decades of oil extraction in the Niger Delta. Their claim was one of the first major attempts to hold a transnational corporation accountable for human rights violations committed abroad. Although the case, Wiwa v. Royal Dutch Shell (2009), resulted in a settlement between the two parties, it also showed that while these corporations have huge power and resources that can impact communities worldwide, there are still no binding international legal mechanisms that hold them accountable for their human rights violations and environmental harms.
Read MoreIn the past fifty years, torrents of environmental regulations have washed down upon corporate activity around the world, collecting into what many have termed an ‘environmental alphabet soup.’ Indeed, over 1,300 multilateral environmental agreements, 2,200 baseline environmental assessments, 250 other environmental agreements, and 90,000 individual country actions in accordance with these assessments currently exist. Yet, because international environmental standards lack systematic means of enforcing corporate adherence, corporate heads have the leeway to continue prioritizing profit over their environmental responsibilities, and, as a consequence, the world has seen a 75 percent increase in global greenhouse gas emissions between 1970 and 2004. To remedy this lack of oversight, the corporate accountability movement aims to build an environmental standard of care: a set of responsibilities each corporate entity has to prevent any anticipatable environmental damage.
Read More