Good morning, I am Mila Rosenthal, Director of the Business and Human Rights Program at Amnesty International USA

Today Amnesty International releases its new report, "Contracting Out of Human Rights: The Chad-Cameroon Pipeline Project." According to our analysis, this vast project has frozen human rights protection for the thousands of people who live in the pipeline's path, allowing the ExxonMobil-led Consortium that operates it to sidestep the rule of law in Chad and Cameroon. Amnesty International has found that the legal agreements between Exxon and the governments of Chad and Cameroon threaten the ability of those countries to effectively protect their citizens over the next seven decades. What's at stake here is the sovereignty of national governments in the face of the overwhelming power of global corporations.

We're very pleased that in the audience today are representatives from NGOs, the World Bank and IFC, IMF, the U.S. Congress, State Department, USTR, OPIC, Ex-Im Bank, oil companies, ambassadors from oil-producing countries, commercial banks, law firms, and investors. I think together we can take steps to address the concerns raised in the report. And if you look at the back of the report, you'll see that we have recommendations for many of your institutions.

The Chad-Cameroon pipeline project is supported by lenders such as the World Bank, export credit agencies such as Ex-Im Bank, and private banks such as ABN AMRO. Chevron and Petronas are minority partners in the oil Consortium. Exxon led the negotiations on the legal agreements and the Chad and Cameroon governments signed them. Amnesty International today calls on all of these actors to re-examine the legal agreements and encourage a legal regime that lets Chad and Cameroon develop, improve and flourish.

Both Chad and Cameroon are extremely poor countries, with appalling human rights records. As this mammoth pipeline was being planned a few years ago, there was widespread concern that oil would be not a blessing but a curse. In other African countries, such as Nigeria, and around the world, such as we all saw recently in Ecuador, natural resource exploitation has contributed to a deteriorating cycle of corruption, social unrest, conflict, and environmental destruction and has failed to benefit the population.

Participants in this project, especially the World Bank, sought to find ways to help Chad and Cameroon avoid the "oil curse" from this and subsequent oil development projects. The World Bank designed unusual measures that make it an interesting experiment in breaking the curse. An oil revenue management system was designed to try to ensure that oil money will be spent to benefit the population as a whole. Many of us are watching with great interest to see if this experiment is successful, and this will be the subject of an Amnesty International report in the near future.

However, Amnesty International's report today, "Contracting Out of Human Rights," reveals other concerns with the project:

1. The legal framework of State-Investor Agreements that underpins the project makes Exxon and the other oil companies legally unaccountable.
2. These agreements make it very difficult, if not impossible, to apply new regulations to the Consortium's behavior for the lifetime of the project, up to 70 years.
3. These agreements guarantee that the commercial interests of the project are protected even when human rights are not.

These agreements must be amended. Both Chad and Cameroon are obliged under international law to regulate the conduct of third parties, including companies, to respect human rights. Meanwhile these project agreements are designed to keep the project running smoothly by eliminating interference and to reduce the financial risks to the companies by stabilizing regulation. So, when the governments of either country want to change laws that could affect the project, they have to get the prior consent of Exxon. In other words, if Chad wants to regulate Exxon, Exxon has to agree.

For example, if the current pipeline waste disposal system were found to endanger the health and lives of the local population, Chad may hesitate to pass a new law governing waste disposal because Exxon could claim the new law would cut into its profits.

Additionally, the grievance procedure for individuals who suffer because of the project is utterly inadequate and could severely limit people from obtaining justice. So people might have no recourse if their water is polluted or taken over by the project, if their land is destroyed, if they can't farm or raise their animals or provide for their families. And all of this is happening in Chad and Cameroon now.

Certainly Amnesty International understands that when a multinational company invests heavily in a country with a history of instability, the company would want some guarantees. But what we're seeing in the Chad and Cameroon agreements, and in other State-Investor Agreements, is unchecked corporate risk management. The terms of these investment agreements fundamentally affect whether countries can regulate companies and protect their citizens from the potentially devastating impacts of corporate activity. So people in these countries are paying the price for Exxon's risk management by having their own lives, and the lives of their children and grandchildren, placed at risk.

Unfortunately, the threats in this pipeline project aren't unusual. They are business as usual. Many other large foreign investments, including dams, logging concessions, and infrastructure development, use these same kinds of agreements. Those projects are also backed by public financial institutions like the World Bank, and by government export credit agencies and commercial banks. In fact, this is the second in a series of reports that Amnesty International has produced on the subject of State-Investor Agreements and human rights. The first report from 2003, "Human Rights on the Line: The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan [BTC] Project," argued that legal agreements underpinning that project systematically undermined human rights. Those agreements, like the ones we're talking about today, imposed limits on the governments of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey that constrained them from protecting human rights. British Petroleum led the BTC Consortium of companies. BP responded to some of Amnesty International's concerns by taking legal steps to guide the interpretation of the State-Investor Agreements to try to ensure they can't be used to undermine human rights protections in those countries. Representatives from BP are also here in the audience today and can answer your questions.

Can you imagine the United States government signing an agreement like this with a foreign company? Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Chad, Cameroon all signed these agreements to secure the foreign investment they wanted. Amnesty International believes that no country should "contract out of human rights" -- and no company should ask them to.

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