Mhina, Mkombozi Vincent2019-11-142020-01-082019-11-142020-01-082014Mhina, M. V (2014) Environment degradation and human rights: a cross-national case study based on petroleum and mineral industries in selected developing countries, Doctoral dissertation, University of Dar es Salaam. Dar es Salaam.http://localhost:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/6396Available in print form, East Africana Collection, Dr. Wilbert Chagula Library, Class mark (THS EAD K3584.6.M4754)Globalisation, the unprecedented expansion of multinational capitalism throughout the globe, has unleashed TNCs which operate primarily through foreign direct investment in private industry, at the expense of the environment and the human rights of local populations in the countries of investment. Informed by country-specific case studies drawn from the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Republic of Ecuador and Papua New Guinea, the present thesis aims at establishing the link between foreign investment in the third world, environmental degradation and violations of human rights norms. It argues that, thanks to perfunctory regulatory systems, mining and petroleum companies operating in the context of joint ventures in partnership with governments of producing third world countries exert the greatest adverse impact on the quality of the environment and enjoyment of an array of human rights in the Third World. The conflict of interest that is endemic in the government’s dual and contradictory role as co-venturer and industry regulator has inevitably compromised the government’s ability to regulate the environmental and human impacts of petroleum and mineral development, has rendered whole communities bereft of and in desperate need of effective legal redress and has left ill-disposed foreign legal systems besieged with plaintiffs from producing countries.This thesis challenges the wisdom of the current human rights framework according to which responsibility for human rights violations lies solely with governments of sovereign countries. Through a rare glimpse provided by the emerging case law based partly on an application of the Alien Torts Claims Act (ATCA), a rather dated, unique but exemplary piece of United States legislation that is essentially an assertion of universal jurisdiction, and partly on extraterritorial environmental litigation, and guided by a critical analysis of human rights litigation before the Inter-American and African regional human rights systems, this thesis discusses the constraints and prospects of using both the private law notion of mass extraterritorial torts and existing human rights norms to check corporate abuse of the environment and human rights violations by western-based resource transnational corporations.The thesis concludes that the application of both theories promises very little in terms of holding multinational corporations legally accountable for their adverse impacts on the quality of the environment and enjoyment of human rights in developing countries. The thesis proceeds to adopt long term recommendations for the adaptation of the international human rights system to meet the corporate environmental and human rights challenge as well as short-term recommendations in the form of adoption of a private contractual approach aimed at addressing the key contemporary environmental and human rights issues that face companies and governments alike in the mining and petroleum industries of the third world.enEnvironmental lawHuman rightsPetroleum amd mineral industriesDeveloping countriesThesis