Big Oil company Chevron may have hoped that its legal troubles as far as Nigeria were over.
However, in a great victory for human rights campaigners, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has fixed June 14, 2010 to open appeal hearings in the case.

Continuing our African focus over the last couple of days, let’s turn to Somalia.
I spent some six months in the country over twenty years ago and even then the American oil company Amoco was busy exploring for oil in the North of the country and in the Gulf of Aden.
The reasoning being simple – the [...]

They are two moments in history, intricately linked, although poles apart. Today Peter Voser,  the chief executive of Shell, outlines the company’s financial and production strategy for the coming year.
Once again Nigeria was mentioned as a key country where the company had added strategic reserves.
“These are exciting times for Shell”, said Voser. “We are poised [...]

So seven years later it will come down to this weekend.  Whether President Obama can withdraw all American combat troops from Iraq by August will be decided by the Iraqi elections this weekend.
If the election passes off peacefully, American soldiers will probably go home on schedule. But if there is a repeat of the sectarian [...]

Having written about Shell in Nigeria for over fifteen years, we have known that there was huge internal disquiet about the company’s operations in the country.
In the aftermath of the murder of Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995, Shell was pilloried in the international press for being complicit in his death and for being an [...]