Public bank in pipeline protest
Legal statements of villagers presented

Environment and human rights campaigners will target a key City bank on Friday, urging it not to give taxpayers' money to an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Turkey.

The protest will take place at the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which a BP-led consortium has approached for public funding for its Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. The planned $3 billion pipeline would pass through 1,000 miles of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. [1]

On Friday protesters will present legal testimonies of 34 people affected by the pipeline, who have joined a legal challenge to the project through the European Commission. [2]

Last month the European Commission announced that it would investigate human rights abuses arising from the pipeline project. This followed a complaint by environment and human rights groups and Kurdish villagers affected by the project, claiming that the legal agreements for the project break Turkey's accession agreements for entry into the European Union. [3]

Kerim Yildiz, Director of the Kurdish Human Rights Project, commented,
"These statements are just the tip of the iceberg, and more are coming in every day. Pipeline companies have not consulted the people who will be harmed by the project. Until this is rectified, it must not receive public funding".

Kate Geary, of the Baku Ceyhan Campaign, said,
"Consultation on this project has been a sham. Since neither BP nor EBRD has consulted properly, we are bringing affected people's views to them".

The EBRD is owned publicly, by its member countries, and was set up to support economic and democratic transition in former Soviet Bloc countries. The UK's vote on whether to back the project is one of the biggest issues currently facing Secretary of State for International Development, Valerie Amos.

Tony Juniper, Director of Friends of the Earth, commented,
"This pipeline is designed to boost BP's profits at the expense of local people and the environment. Taxpayers' money should be used for social development and for clean energies, not for dirty fossil fuel projects which worsen climate change".

James Marriott, of PLATFORM, added,
"This project will harm local economies, by damaging farmland and threatening Georgia's vital mineral water production. It will undermine democracy, through draconian legal agreements that restrict the host governments' ability to regulate. If EBRD decides to back this project, it will be contradicting its mission of supporting democracy and economic development".

Notes for editors

1: 70% of the estimated $3bn cost of the pipeline is projected to come from external funding, led by the EBRD and the International Finance Corporation. The IFC, part of the World Bank, is also using public money.

2: For example, one of the statements reads,

"The pipeline goes through my village and my own lands. The construction company which is going to build the pipeline, made me sign the papers they put in front of me without having a detailed meeting about it. I do not speak Turkish as a mother tongue/native since my mother tongue is Kurdish. They spoke to me in Turkish therefore I did not understand quite a lot of the things they told me. While my lands were being expropriated, I was not given any detailed information about the project. I was not given the opportunity to bargain on the amount they offered either."

The testimonies are all available on request.

3: In a letter (available on request), dated 4th August 2003, to the Kurdish Human Rights Project, the EC's Directorate of Enlargement states:

"Turkey has undertaken to comply with the EU accession criteria, including the Copenhagen political criteria on democracy, the protection of human rights and of minority rights. For this reason, any human rights or national minority rights violations arising from the implementation of the above mentioned Pipeline Project would have to be seen in the context of the Copenhagen political criteria. The Commission will continue to follow closely the developments in Turkey surrounding this case and give an assessment of the human rights and minority rights situation in its regular report in November this year."