CHAPTER ONE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
1.1.Background to the Study
This study is an analysis of the concept of corporate environmental responsibility, its laws and a critical examination of its practice level in Nigeria, showing that government and corporations may no longer plead it as a mere voluntary self-regulatory venture and consideration on international legal norms of a near soft law. The importance of corporate environmental responsibility in any legal and social system cannot be overemphasized. It is indeed, one of the lessons of globalization and the new international economic order, now metamorphosing into a legal order with increasing awareness that the enforcement and achievement of human rights require legal mechanism for responsibility and liability of corporations, as well as states and individuals. This is undeniably, a cornerstone in the realization of sustainable development, nationally and internationally. The importance of such a legal system lies not only in the protection of civil liberties and prosecution of criminals but also in using responsibility regime as a means of promoting and advancing fair, just and efficient relationship between communities and corporations, for the sustainability of environment and guarantee of human rights and development for the citizenry.
International minimum standards have emerged, and have set the benchmark for the domestic enforcement of human rights. Judicially and theoretically, these standards include the duty of care and the liability for breach of states and corporations in the dimension of environmental protection.[1] As it develops, international environmental law raises main issues already contained in international human rights law. In environmental protection, questions related to the existence and application of liability and responsibility law and the expected role of individuals, to the state and corporations in the legal process have raised analogous issues to those within the realm of international human rights law. These issues are closely related, overlapping and interoperable in the developing activities of environmental legal systems. However, the development of international human rights law predated environmental law and all the elements that flow from it, such as corporate responsibility and liability doctrine. It has been affirmed that human rights law provides a rich source of experience for the understanding and applicability of environmental law from which the doctrine of corporate responsibility sprang.[2]
[1] M.Uibopuu, “The Internationally Guaranteed Right of an Individual to a Clean Environment” 1 Comparative Law Yearbook (1977), p. 101; W. Gormley, “The Legal Obligation of the International Community to Guarantee a Pure and Decent Environment: The Expansion of Human Right Norms” 3 Georgetown International Environmental Law Review (1991) p. 85.
[2] See P. Sands, Principles of International Environmental Law, 2nd edn; United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 292.
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APPRAISAL OF CORPORATE ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSIBILITY PRACTICES IN NIGERIA
