It’s been quite a week. We’ve been amazed by you – our supporters, dismayed by the Financial Times and of course outraged by Shell.

Thanks to your generosity and commitment to the people of the Niger Delta, we were able to realise our ambition of booking a full page ad in the Financial Times on the day of Shell’s AGM.

Then, at 4:58pm the night before, the FT decided to pull the plug on the ad. It seemed like devastating news, but with so much at stake we couldn’t despair. We already had the Evening Standard on board and at the last minute we were able to place the ad in the Metro – a paper we knew shareholders would pick up on the way to the meeting.

And if they didn’t see the papers, they couldn’t have missed the van outside the AGM. Our valiant van driver, Steve, drove the ad van around London’s streets throughout the day – and it certainly made an impact. We saw plenty of people stop in their tracks to read it and have a little think. Here’s the van on Bishopsgate early on Tuesday morning:

Hundreds more of you helped by sharing the ad the FT wouldn’t publish on Facebook, Twitter and on your blogs.

This was your campaign – you made it all possible, and we completely understand if those of you who donated are feeling disappointed about the FT’s refusal to print the ad. It was a controversial decision – and one that led to more publicity and more people talking about Shell’s operations in the Niger Delta than we could ever have planned or imagined. So you certainly gave Shell’s shareholders something to think about.

We have really appreciated all your feedback too. We’ll definitely take it on board for future actions. And we will not give up until Shell cleans up its act and the people of the Niger Delta have their rights respected.
NB. You can download the advert here

On Tuesday 18 May, shareholders meet for oil giant Royal Dutch Shell’s Annual General Meeting (AGM), relayed live to London’s Barbican Centre. While they toast £9.8 billion profits, there will be less talk of how Shell’s activities are making life hell for people in the Niger Delta.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to our hugely successful fundraising campaign we’ve been able to place adverts telling the shameful truth about Shell in Tuesday’s Metro and Evening Standard, and on a van driving round the streets of London throughout the day. Shareholders will be confronted by the reality of what they’ve invested in on their way to the AGM, outside the event and on their way home too.

LATEST NEWS: How the Financial Times pulled our ad at 4.58pm yesterday evening

Over the past week or so, this initiative has raised awareness and generated lively debate about Shell’s activities. Here are a couple of ways you can help keep that momentum going:

1. Ensure our AGM ad campaign makes its mark

Help ensure the flipside of Shell’s successes are talked about on the day of their AGM. Look out for our advert and take a picture of yourself perusing it in the Metro or Evening Standard. Share it on Twitter with the tag #shellagm, or send it directly to @shelldotcom. You can also email your photos to amnesty.amnesty@gmail.com or text it to +44 7733 134670 and we’ll put it in our gallery.

If you live or work in central London, keep an eye for our ad van which will be on the streets all day. Tweet or send us a picture if it passes your house, office or uni.

2. Spread the word about Shell’s embarrassing gas problem

We also want as many people as possible to see this video about the impact Shell’s illegal practice of gas flaring is having on communities in the Niger Delta. We were really interested to hear your thoughts on our ‘Welcome to Shell’ film so please let us know what you think – and spread the word!

Gas flaring happens when oil is pumped out of the ground, producing gas. The gas is separated out and, in Nigeria, is usually burnt as waste. This practice, combined with numerous oil spills, has left communities in the Niger Delta with little option but to drink polluted water, eat contaminated fish, farm on spoiled land and breathe in air that smells of oil and gas. It also makes a mockery of Shell’s much-flaunted “business principles”.

For more information on why we’re targeting Shell with this campaign, download a copy of our report: Petroleum, Pollution and Poverty in the Niger Delta.

When shareholders meet for Shell’s AGM on 18 May, you can bet there will be a lot of talk about their $9.8 billion profits. Less talked about will be the human cost of their activities in the Niger Delta – such as the millions of people drinking polluted water, growing crops in polluted soil and raising children in polluted homes.

We decided to run a high-profile advertising campaign to tell shareholders the shameful truth about Shell. We asked you to share in the shaming of Shell by donating towards the cost of displaying this advert.

You didn’t let us down. By Wednesday afternoon, we’d raised enough to fund a full page ad in a prominent newspaper.

By Friday evening, thanks to 2,104 generous donors we’d reached our next target of £30,000!

UPDATE: Find out where to look for the advert on Tuesday 18 May.

This campaign has exceeded all our expectations – we can now run the ad in a smaller local paper that we know shareholders are also likely to be reading AND take it to the streets on a van outside the AGM. Shell’s shareholders simply won’t be able to miss us!

Help us to spread the word. Ask your friends and family to get involved by sharing the campaign by email or on social networks. Here’s a nifty little tool to make it super easy.

Since we’ve launched the Hell station map action, we have received photos from more than 10 countries including Norway, Turkey, US, Germany, Spain, UK and France.

If you are travelling over Xmas and New Year, don’t forget your camera and email us some snaps of Hell stations! It will be great to reach 100 Hell stations by the end of the year.

Just email them to amnesty.amnesty@gmail.com and we will put them up on the map.

Have a nice break!

After the success of our webchat with Shell, and the revealing answers we were given, it is time for the next stage of our campaign to Make Shell Come Clean

Join us as we target Shell on Google Maps, turning Shell stations into ‘hell stations’ to publicly highlight the damage Shell is doing in the Niger Delta (see Amnesty’s report for further details)

We can’t do this without you, so please get involved by taking photos that obscure the S of the Shell sign from view, and sending them to us. Click on one of the logos below to get the idea.

Wherever you are in the world, we want your hell stations!

View Hell stations in a larger map

Task 1: Start snapping those Hell Stations!

Instructions

• Find a Shell station in your area, by searching ‘Shell’ or ‘Shell UK Ltd’ on Google Maps. Alternatively you could use Shell’s own station finder (UK only)
• Use a prop to block the view of the ‘S’ of Shell, as others have done on the map above. Get creative! You could use a friend’s hand, or better still an object that represents your outrage at Shell’s disregard for human rights in the Niger Delta.
• Snap away!

Send them to us

• Simply send an MMS to +44 7733 134670 or amnesty.amnesty@gmail.com with the location of the station, and we’ll do the rest

Task 2: Give Shell stations bad reviews

• Find any Shell station on Google Maps, and give it a one star review, ensuring that your main message is in the first line of the review. It will then show up in searches like this:

A simple Twitter message, repeated by just a few hundred users, and the world’s biggest company was scrambling to set up an online dialogue.

The request was for an opportunity to discuss Amnesty’s recent report ‘Petroleum, Pollution and Poverty’, which highlighted human rights abuses in the Niger Delta, where despite vast profits for oil companies, 31 million people are living in poverty.

The details were soon finalised. It was to happen on the Shell Dialogues site, with a parallel and open chat right here on Protect the Human.

On one side was Shell, with a panel of five senior staff, a slick introductory video and a well-oiled PR machine. On the other, the 445 individuals who had registered to take part, including experts from Amnesty, the Remember Saro-wiwa campaign, Friends of the Earth and local organisations based in Nigeria.

The stage was set.

What followed was an endless stream of questions about Shell’s human rights record, including why they continue with gas flaring despite a government ban, why they haven’t published their environmental assessments, and why they have failed to adequately clean up oil spills.

It didn’t take long before cracks began to appear in their positive PR machine, with country chair Basil Omiyi admitted that ‘Yes’, Shell does believe that pollution and environmental damage associated with the oil industry has contributed to poverty and conflict in the Niger Delta. Their assertion that ‘the oil industry’s footprint is impacting on small parts of the delta’ was an understatement of epic proportions, and their claim that ‘Shell is giving all spills immediate attention’ was completely dismissed by those working in the Niger Delta.

We should give Shell some credit for at least being willing to discuss these issues, though their rose tinted view fooled no one.

The next step is to watch this space, for a promised transcript of the dialogue, along with answers to the questions they didn’t have time to answer. In the meantime we are analysing their answers and plotting our next move.

If you’ve not yet sent an email to Shell’s new CEO, please take a moment to do this. If you have, why not send a message to @shelldotcom on Twitter, asking them to respond to the 3500+ emails that have been sent.