The company also states that Shell “has learned from these mistakes” and pledges to take “full responsibility to prevent and mitigate costs for the environment and people affected by our operations”.

Of course the document was not written by the British-Dutch oil corporation, which would never show such honesty about its own operations. It is an idea of environmental federation Friends of the Earth International, which distributed “erratum” among the company’s shareholders in The Hague. Several communities affected by Shell were also there.

The report highlights 12 cases from 5 different continents (in Canada, Nigeria, Brazil, Philippines and Australia). It displays climate and other environmental impacts from Shell’s oil and gas operations, but it also shows the threat it poses to the lives of many local communities. The report also lists human rights violations committed by the corporation as well as cases of corruption and bribery, slavery and violation of national and international laws in order to ensure business profits.

“The erratum should serve as a wake up call for Shell’s shareholders and board”, says a press release issued Tuesday by Friends of the Earth International.

Eric Dooh, a Nigerian farmer who is taking Shell to court in The Netherlands for refusal to clean up oil spills in his fishponds and on his fields warned that the spills from Shell pipelines “caused the water and agricultural land in our village to be severely polluted. We want Shell to clean up the pollution so we can fish and farm again”, said Dooh who will face the company in court in The Hague on May 19.

Friends of the Earth demands Shell to clean up its pollution and to pay a compensation to the communities affected worldwide, to stop the human rights violations and to improve the maintenance of its operations to avoid new cases of pollution and reduce its carbon footprint. The environmental federation is also demanding Shell to terminate operations that pose severe risks to water supplies, health, agriculture and biodiversity, such as high-volume gas-fracking and tar sands.

Meanwhile, Paul de Clerck, coordinator of the corporates campaign at Friends of the Earth International, said: “We expect that the promises in the erratum we wrote for Shell will become reality”. The company “is aware of the damage it is causing to the environment and of the violation of rights of local communities that it is involved in. We want the company to take measures to restore this damage and to prevent further wrongdoing”.

Photo: http://www.foei.org/