A French court has dismissed a case filed by NGOs against TotalEnergies over the East African Oil project in Uganda and Tanzania.
In the case filed in 2019, six French and Ugandan NGOs accused TotalEnergies of not doing enough to protect people and the environment from the Tilenga oil development and the $3.5 billion East African Crude Oil Pipeline.
The activists wanted court to order TotalEnergies to halt the east African projects, basing their case on a 2017 French law that requires companies to identify human rights and environmental risks in their global operations and supply chains and to take measures to prevent them.
However, on Tuesday, a French court ruled that the six NGOs from France and Uganda didn’t follow the right procedures in their case against TotalEnergies.
The court therefore ruled that the case is inadmissible.
Campaigners against Uganda’s oil project have in the past suffered several defeats in the move to stop the project.
President Museveni recently assured Ugandans that nothing can change what has already been agreed upon for the construction of the pipeline.
“I want to assure you that the project shall proceed as stipulated in the contract we have with Total energies.
We should remember that Total Energies convinced me about the idea of the pipeline and if they choose to listen to the EU Parliament, they will compensate us and we shall find someone else to work with,” Museveni said last year.
