Lawyers With Borders Supports BP's Right to Spill Oil: "A Principled and Unselfish Exercise of a Human Right"

Lawyers With Borders praises BP for exercising its right to spill oil into the ocean. "This spill is something to celebrate. It shows our human rights laws are working," said Lawyers With Borders Founder and Executive Director Brian J. Foley.

"Laws that would aim to prevent oil spills are a restriction on corporate rights. As corporations are people under our laws, these laws are therefore restrictions on human rights," Foley said. "BP has managed to exercise its human right, which shows a triumph for human rights laws," he added.

However, these very rights are endangered. "Many government officials will undoubtedly seek to create restrictive, strait-jacket-like laws calling for 'accountability,'" Foley said. "But," Foley explained, "imposing accountability at this point will only set human rights law back by several decades."

Foley also praised BP's "taking a stand for the right of all of us to spill oil or anything else we want into the so-called environment. BP's action is Gandhian, in a way," he said.

"Some people worry about what might happen if there is a big oil spill, and they dream up all sorts of hypotheticals about how the law might be used against oil companies," he said. "But BP took action where others only talked and is testing the legitimacy of those laws and undoubtedly will fight and defeat those laws by proving they are illegitimate," Foley said.

To critics who believe that the oil spill is harmful, Foley responded, "you are overlooking that BP, like all of us, has a right to make mistakes. As Shakespeare wrote, 'To err is human.' Accordingly, we have a human right to err."

"So let's all of us take a stand for human rights and support BP in what must be a tough but potentially productive time in its corporate history," Foley said.

Foley urged people to donate money to BP to help it continue "its sometimes lonely stand for human rights and to mitigate any negative impact on BP's profitability as a result of its principled and unselfish exercise of a human right."

LAWYERS WITH BORDERS is a non-governmental organization (NGO) modeled after Doctors Without Borders, except that its members are juris doctors, not medical doctors, and Lawyers With Borders does not help people without regard to borders, travel distance, or other jurisdictional issues, or for free. Neither BP nor any other oil company has paid for or requested this Statement of Support; rather, Lawyers With Borders issues such Statements in hope that the subject(s) of the Statement will retain Lawyers With Borders and pay for the campaign.