A coalition of French and Ugandan activists are suing TotalEnegies, alleging the French oil major violated food and land rights. The lawsuit, filed in French court on Tuesday, alleges Total violated a French “duty of vigilance” law and seeks damages for those harmed by the company’s Tilenga oil development and the $3.5 billion East African Crude Oil Pipeline.
Total is the largest shareholder in the nearly 900-mile heated crude oil pipeline activists have criticized as yet another example of energy colonialism — the extraction of African resources by overseas actors with little benefit for local communities. Among the allegations in the lawsuit is Total’s relocation of families dislocated by the pipeline into “small, inappropriate replacement housing that is not suitable to the family sizes of affected households,” Dickens Kamugisha, head of the Uganda-based Africa Institute for Energy Governance, told the AP. Just Stop Oil protesters also demonstrated outside Total’s London headquarters on Tuesday. (Lawsuit: AP, Reuters; London protest: The Independent, AFP)