In 1998 Exxon and Mobil merged to become the largest energy and petrochemical company in the world, with an annual revenue in 2001 of more than 213 billion dollars and operations in over 200 countries and territories around the world. While on its website ExxonMobil projects an image of a "good corporate citizen," who contributes to programs to promote the well-being of the environment and the communities in which it produces, the reality on the ground tells another story.

ExxonMobil has a history of working in politically unstable regions with governments that have a record of committing human rights abuses against their own people - Chad, Cameroon, Colombia, Nigeria, Indonesia, Angola, and most recently China. Yet ExxonMobil has consistently rebuffed appeals by major human rights groups to adopt a company-wide human rights policy and to reveal the arrangements under which it hires security forces to protect its facilities. Rather than take concrete steps to protect the environment, ExxonMobil has worked to undercut attempts to stop global warming by actively lobbying against the Kyoto Protocol while investing little in renewable energy. The company pays little attention to indigenous peoples rights on whose traditional lands its operations are often located, and has been destroying the last pristine ecosystems on the earth.

ExxonMobil epitomizes bad corporate behavior writ large. In 1989 the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran into a reef off the coast of Alaska causing an environmentally catastrophic oil spill. Over a decade later, Exxon Mobil is still fighting having to pay clean-up costs, and last year it successfully sued to overturn the punitive damage award. The company is spending billions of dollars a year to conduct oil exploration activities in pristine ecosystems such as the gray whale breeding grounds off Sakhalin Island, Russia and the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, home to the Native Gwich'in, the "people of the caribou." In Africa, the fragile Atlantic Littoral Forest of Cameroon, home to the indigenous Bakoli Tribe, the ecologically diverse Kribi Coast, and the richest food producing region of Chad are being threatened by the Chad Cameroon Oil Pipeline Project.

In Baytown, near Houston, Texas, ExxonMobil operates the largest and most polluting oil refinery in the nation, which has been investigated for violating a portion of the Clean Air Act. ExxonMobil continues to lobby the Bush administration to allow an increase in the emissions from oil refineries.

ExxonMobil's human rights record is not much better. The company routinely forges close working relations with governments implicated in abusing the human rights of their citizens. Human and labor rights groups are suing the company for human rights violations in Aceh, Indonesia, charging that it contracted with the Indonesia military to provide security for its natural gas project and offered its company facilities to the military, who used them to torture and interrogate possible guerillas.

In Colombia, the entire village of Tabaco was forcibly relocated to make way for an open pit coalmine, at the time majority owned by ExxonMobil's wholly owned subsidiary Intercor. And when Exxon merged with Mobil, it became the first U.S. employer ever to rescind a non-discrimination policy covering sexual orientation.

If ExxonMobil had been required to disclose information on the human and environmental impacts of its foreign operations under a corporate accountability framework, the American people and the affected communities around the world might have had a fair chance at ensuring that these abuses were stopped. Moreover, ExxonMobil might have reconsidered how it conducted its business, if it were not allowed to operate behind a veil of secrecy - if it were required to disclose whether it has a human rights policy, its arrangement with security forces, its toxic emissions, and extraction of natural resources.

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