By Tara Van Ho. Tara Van Ho is a post-doctoral research fellow with the INTRALaw Centre at the University of Aarhus’s Department of Law, and a project associate with the Essex Business & Human Rights Project here at Essex. She was formerly a corporate lawyer and now provides human rights research, trainings, and consultancies for NGOs, states, and IGOs. You can follow her on twitter: @TaraVanHo
In a resource-rich Southeast Asian country, a foreign corporation laid an oil pipeline on the outskirts of a town. The assumption by the corporation and the state was that their chosen location for the pipeline wouldn’t cause a disruption to nearby houses and was therefore fine from a human rights perspective. What they didn’t know was that the chosen location required the destruction of trees considered sacred to the local population, a minority ethnic group with specific local traditions. Continue reading