allAfrica.com: Nigeria: Respect Ruling On Gas Flaring, Group Tells Shell

EXTRACT: “While Shell and its shareholders count their profits all we can count are the early graves that their toxic gas flares keep sending our people. It is morally wrong for Shell to continue with gas flaring despite a ruling that has ordered them to cease it.

THE ARTICLE

This Day (Lagos)
Posted to the web 9 May 2007
Godwin Haruna
Lagos

The Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) has called on the Shell Petroleum and Development Company (SPDC) to respect a High Court judgment which ordered the global group to stop gas flaring in Iwherekan community in Delta State by April 30, 2007.

In a statement issued by its progamme manager, Mr. Akinbode Oluwafemi, the environmental group lamented that despite the expiration of the April 30 deadline by the court, Shell has allegedly continued to flare gas in the community and other places in Nigeria with impunity, while allegedly employing delay tactics and strategies to foil legal processes.
 
A Federal High court sitting in Benin and presided by Justice V. C Nwokorie, had on November 14, 2005 ordered Shell to stop gas flaring in Iwherekan Community, Delta State by April 2007, saying it violates the fundamental right to life and dignity.

The suit, filed on July 20, 2005 by Mr. Jonah Gbemre on behalf of himself and Iwerekan community against Shell, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF), sought among other reliefs, the stoppage of gas flaring in the community.

Oluwafemi disclosed that in April 2006, proceedings of contempt of court was filed against Shell’s Managing Director, Basil Omiyi, NNPC Group Managing Director, Funso Kupolokun, and its (NNPC) Company Secretary, Mrs. Sena Anthony in December, 2006, after Shell and NNPC allegedly failed to comply with the court order.

According to him, “after filing of contempt of court proceedings against Shell, the company was granted a ‘conditional stay of execution’, releasing it from the duty to comply with a court order in November 2005 to stop flaring. The court gave the following conditions of which none have been met. The conditions are that Shell be allowed a period of one year to achieve a quarterly phase-by-phase stoppage of its gas flaring in Nigeria under the supervision of the High Court”.

Another condition, he said, was a detailed phase-by-phase technical scheme of arrangement, scheduled to achieve a total non-flaring scenario in all their on-shore flow stations by April 30, this year; which must be submitted to the court personally by Omiyi, Kupolukun, Mr. Edmund Daukoru and Mrs Anthony”.
 
“But on April 30, when Shell was to appear in court, the plaintiff’s legal representative who was present in court discovered that not only has no such detailed scheme been submitted, but that Justice Nwokorie had been removed from the case having been transferred to another court in Katsina. The court file was not available, and no representative of the company or government turned up”.

“While Shell and its shareholders count their profits all we can count are the early graves that their toxic gas flares keep sending our people. It is morally wrong for Shell to continue with gas flaring despite a ruling that has ordered them to cease it.

Shell continues not only to waste Nigeria’s natural resources in this way, but is wasting the lives of poor people in our communities who cannot avoid the impacts of gas flaring,” said ERA Executive Director, Nnimmo Bassey.

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