A BP-led consortium is breaking international rules governing the human rights responsibilities of multinational companies in its operations on the controversial Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the UK Government ruled today...The ruling sets a major precedent. In future, to comply with these corporate social responsibility guidelines, multinationals will have to take into account the human rights context in which they operate, including the risk of intimidation, when designing and implementing corporate grievance mechanisms...Given BP’s legally-binding commitment to ensure that the BTC project complies with the OECD Guidelines, today’s ruling from the UK government potentially places the company in breach of its contracts with the major international financial institutions (IFIs) that backed the project with taxpayers’ money in 2004...The failure of BP to adhere to the OECD Guidelines and the Voluntary Principles, as required under the BTC project agreements, also raises major concerns over the due diligence undertaken by the IFIs before supporting the pipeline.