26 Ugandans filed a lawsuit against French oil firm TotalEnergies on Tuesday June 27th in Paris, France, seeking compensation for alleged abuses of human rights at the company’s huge megaprojects there.
People from the impacted areas, joined by five French and Ugandan charity organizations, claim that the energy company TotalEnergies caused “serious harm,” notably to their rights to land and food.
The East African Crude Oil Pipeline (Eacop) project, a 1,500 km pipeline bringing crude oil to the Tanzanian coast through a number of protected nature reserves, and the Tilenga exploration of 419 oil wells, one-third of which are in Uganda’s largest national park of Murchison Falls, are at the center of their complaint before the Paris court.
“People affected by the work have been deprived of free use of their land for three or four years, in violation of their property rights,” the associations relayed.
“Some villages suffered flooding caused by construction at the Tilenga project’s oil treatment plant. What’s more, several plaintiffs suffered threats, harassment, and arrest simply for daring to criticize oil projects in Uganda and Tanzania and defend the rights of affected communities,” they added.
Jelousy Mugisha and Fred Mwesigwa, two campaigners, traveled to France in 2019 for a case that sought to compel Total to keep an eye out for human rights breaches. “When they returned to Uganda one was arrested at the airport and the other attacked at his home 10 days later,” the NGOs said.
A third, Maxwell Athura, said he faced “threats and intrusions at his home” and was “arbitrarily arrested twice in 2022.”
“By falling short in its duty of vigilance, Total caused serious harm to the plaintiffs, especially to their rights to land and food.
They are therefore requesting the company be ordered to compensate them,” the statement continued.
According to the organizations, the two TotalEnergies projects have resulted in the total or partial expropriation of land belonging to more than 118,000 individuals.
“It is unacceptable that foreign oil companies continue to make extraordinary profits while communities affected by their projects in Uganda are harassed, displaced, poorly compensated and living in abject poverty on their own land,” said Frank Muramuzi, Executive Director of Friends of the Earth’s Ugandan branch and local NGO, NAPE.
TotalEnergies, according to the groups, should have been aware of possible significant rights abuses connected to its plans for Uganda, but the company “did not act when warned they existed and did not implement corrective measures once the human rights violations occurred.”
They claim that under Total’s plans from 2018 to 2023, there were “no steps addressing population displacements, limits on people’s access to their means of subsistence, or threats against human rights defenders.”
In an effort to get TotalEnergies to stop developing Tilenga and Eacop in 2019, Friends of the Earth and four Ugandan organizations were unsuccessful before a French court.
