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MEDIA RELEASE
29 April 2003
Environmentalists launch unprecedented
legal attack against British Petroleum and Caspian Pipeline Partners
Press conference Tuesday, April 29, 10:30
Room 149, Centre international de conference,
19 avenue Kleber, Paris 16eme, M‹ Kleber
Campagna per la Riforma della Banca
Mondiale | Cornerhouse | FERN | Friends of the Earth England Wales &
Northern Ireland | Friends of the Earth France | Friends of the Earth
Netherlands | Friends of the Earth US | Platform | Urgewald | German-watch
| BUND | WEED
As finance ministers and business leaders gather in Paris for the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Developmentfs (OECD) Forum 2003, environmental
organizations today submitted complaints to the governments of the U.K.,
France, Germany, Italy, and U.S., charging that BP and its consortium
partners[1] in the proposed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline are
breaching the OECDfs Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises.
The OECD Guidelines oblige companies to gcontribute to sustainable development
and to refrain from seeking or accepting exemptions from environmental,
health, safety, labour, taxation and other legislation.h The NGOfs charge
that the consortium has negotiated agreements that openly flout this obligation,
thus shifting the environmental and human rights risks of the project
unto the local population.
E Helene Ballande, Les Amis de la Terre, France
E Nicholas Hildyard, The Cornerhouse, UK
E Jon Sohn, Friends of the Earth US
E Heike Drillisch, WEED, Germany
will present the complaints and answer questions about what they have
discovered about this project.
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline is a proposed pipeline that
would span 1,056 miles (1,760 kilometers) from the Azerbaijan capital
of Baku, through T'bilisi Georgia, ending in the Mediterranean city of
Ceyhan, Turkey. A gas pipeline also is planned to follow the same route.
British Petroleum (BP) is the lead sponsor; there are nine other participants.
They are seeking financial and political support of their countries export
credit agencies, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
and the World Bank Group.
For more information, contact Nick Hildyard at: + 44 777 37 50 534
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[1] The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Consortium (BTC Co) is comprised of BP, which
has controlling interest, as well as 9 companies from 8 other nations:
SOCAR (Azerbaijan), Unocal, ConocoPhillips, (US) Statoil (Norway), TPAO
(Turkey), ENI (Italy), TotalFinaElf (France), Itochu, Inpex (Japan), and
Delta Hess (joint US-Saudi).
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