Don’t sacrifice human rights in the name of development

European financial institutions must keep their environmental commitments beyond EU borders.

For years in the Kazakh village of Sarykamys, people would go to sleep in their beds and never wake up again. It was not the peaceful end to a long life, but a sudden end that struck people as young as 25. The locals called it the “death of shift workers”. Many of those who died worked in the Tengiz oil field, which had been developed near the village along the shore of the Caspian Sea. Environmentalists linked the sudden deaths to the release of toxic gases like hydrogen sulfide, as a result of drilling. Since the development of the oil field, in 1993, 5.5 percent of Sarykamys’ population has died, possibly as a result of pollution from oil field operations, and by the early 2000s doctors said that 90 percent of the village’s population had developed illnesses. Official statistics, however, undercounted the number of deaths as a result of the drilling, only counting the people who died at work.