Contracting Out of Human Rights

Book excerpt: One of the largest private-sector investment projects in Africa is threatening human rights in Chad and Cameroon. A consortium of oil companies, led by ExxonMobil and including Chevron and Petronas, is extracting oil from the Doba oilfields in southern Chad and transporting it through a newly built 1,070 km pipeline to Cameroon's Atlantic coast. International law places the primary obligation for realising human rights on states. However, there is increasing recognition that responsibility for contributing to the protection of human rights extends to other actors in society, as acknowledged in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Amnesty International believes that companies have human rights responsibilities within their sphere of influence. These extend globally and are particularly relevant when companies operate in countries where grave violations of human rights are part of the context of their activities, as is the case in Chad and Cameroon. This report highlights the potential dangers to human rights posed by investment agreements underpining the pipeline project, as well as the need for a new approach to investment that ensures respect for human rights. Amnesty International calls on the governments, international financial institutions and companies involved in the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project to revise the investment agreements to include an explicit guarantee that nothing in them can be used to undermine either the human rights obligations of the states or the human rights responsibilities of the companies.