Preventing Violent Conflicts Caused by Infringements of Indigenous Peoples’ Rights: the Case of the Ecuadorian Amazon

Abstract

Businesses are naturally expected to go extra lengths in pursuing peaceful resolution of conflicts when they are operating in conflict zones. This expectation is particularly heightened where their operations are the causes of the conflicts or when they are implicated in the conflicts. It gets more complicated when a particular set of people subsumed within the vulnerable group, for example children, women and indigenous people, allege violation of their fundamental human rights. Complicity in human rights abuses is definitely an issue that multinational oil companies (MOCs) do not want to contend with, since there is always international response alert for identifying and sanctioning the culprits of such violations. This paper examines the role of the MOCs operating in conflict zones created as a result of violations of rights of the indigenous people of the Ecuadorian Amazon and concludes that there is an imminent need for the MOCs involved to make concerted efforts in pursuing peaceful resolution of the conflict.