Regulating environmental responsibility for the multinational oil industry: continuing challenges for international law

摘要

States utilise international law to create opportunities within global markets for private transnational economic actors, such as multinational oil companies, to invest and/or operate within foreign jurisdictions. However, there is a lack of directly enforceable international mechanisms against these private actors when they cause environmental damage abroad. International law responses to this problem range from the establishment of international compulsory compensation schemes, the proposed expansion of the doctrine of State responsibility to include liability for private actors and more recently, through litigation in the home States of multinational oil companies. However, both international jurisprudence and US, Dutch and British domestic case law reveal an ambivalence towards holding such private transnational economic actors legally accountable in their home State jurisdictions for violations committed abroad. Certain States (the USA and France) have responded to this ambivalence by reasserting their domestic regulatory powers to require immediate clean-up and compensation, prior to domestic judicial litigation, whereas other States (Nigeria) are unable to achieve the same level of effective enforcement due to their weaker political and economic bargaining positions.