“I have never seen flooding like this in all my life. It was a surprise to me that the lockup shop that I left the day before the flooding was totally covered by water when I returned a day after and all the cushioned chairs and wood for my work were totally soaked in water. Since the incident I have depended on goodwill of the public to feed. Government should come to our rescue...'-Ikedioha James, Upholstery maker

“Beneku community is host to Agip facility here in Kwale but they named most of their project in Okpia, but over here in the Community no one can talk to Agip because Agip is like the gods to the People. When there is a spill from their facility they just move in to the site and do their repairs without consulting anybody.
Agip operations are not being monitored by anyone. In August there was a spill from their pipeline and they moved into the site to fix the pipe and gave one of our brothers here in the community the clean up contract. He scooped over 10 drums from the pond and they said with that they had done the clean up. When I got the information of this  leakage I had to call ERA so you can witness how we are dying in silence…” -Eze Nwaeze, Youth chairman, Beneku Community

Theme: Environment responsibilities of resource companies under host country and home country laws -the growing demand for extraterritorial liability - case studies and options for reform. All protocols duly observed.

Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen I am humbled by this great privilege afforded me by the organisers of this session of the 2010 Annual Conference of the International Bar Association – the global voice of the legal profession.I neither claim holistic nor monopolistic knowledge of the issue I am called upon to discuss thus what I will do here is to tease out some of the issues of critical concern to vast majority of deprived local community peoples of Nigeria who bear the brunt of the impact of foreign resource corporations,

Nnimmo Bassey (Oil politics)

Trees are the lungs of the earth; it can be assumed then Nigeria, which displays severe cases of deforestation, is literally gasping for breath for lack of oxygen. That Nigeria’s rainforests have been depleted to less than 10 percent of its size 50 years ago is not news.

What is left of our forests are under threat, and many areas are degraded and converted for other uses. This phenomenon is not restricted to Nigeria. Overall, the United Nations surmises that 13 million hectares of forested land have been converted every year over the past 10 years and most of this is said to be for agricultural purposes.

The Right Livelihood Award Foundation this morning (September 30, 2010) at a press conference held at the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Press Room, Stockholm, announced the Executive Director of the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN), Nnimmo Bassey among four winners of the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize'.