A new documentary largely successfully avoids the infinite distractions generated by Chevron’s colossal retaliatory litigation campaign and re-focuses back on what happened–and what is happening today– in Ecuador…
Category Archives: clips & press releases
Ecuadorian Constitutional Court Affirms Environmental Judgment Against Chevron
More on this to come (hopefully elaborated in other forums and venues) but here is the decision (in Spanish) and here are the basic parameters:
- This is the fourth Ecuadorian court to uphold the environmental liability judgment against Chevron, the third layer of appeal. All Ecuadorian affirmances have been unanimous.
- The jurisdiction of the Constitutional Court (CC) allowed Chevron to challenge any aspect of the proceedings in Ecuador for lack of due process, use of improperly obtained evidence, etc. None of Chevron’s challenges were sustained.
- The decision elaborates a strong human rights-perspective on the underlying questions about the fairness of the judgment and its magnitude. I hope to describe this in more depth shortly.
- The decision was emitted well into the term of office of President Lenin Moreno, who is aggressively seeking to curry favor with the United States, so any sort of claim that the CC decision was politically influenced to Chevron’s detriment is a non-starter.
- The decision is now the most current analysis of the environmental judgment and the controversies surrounding it, made by the court with the broadest jurisdiction to consider it and the challenges to it. Again, the judgment was sustained in full and unanimously.
Here is the BHRRC page on the development. I’ll add more links and analysis as it comes up.
IN CANADA, CHEVRON TRYING TO BLOCK ECUADORIANS FROM USING U.N. DECLARATION TO SUPPORT HISTORIC POLLUTION CASE
[ From TheFirstNationsCanada.com ]
In a Canadian court, Chevron is trying to block submission of a legal brief over how the company’s attempt to evade paying a $9.5 billion environmental judgment in Ecuador violates both Canadian and international law regarding the rights of indigenous peoples.
In a submission before the Ontario Court of Appeal in Toronto, Ecuadorian rainforest communities cite the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in support of their lawsuit to collect the Chevron debt in Canada. The judgment against Chevron was affirmed unanimously in 2013 by Ecuador’s highest court.
A hearing over Chevron’s attempt to block the new argument is scheduled for January 16 before the Ontario Court of Appeal in Toronto. If the submission is allowed, the Ecuadorians plan to use the U.N. Declaration during a critically important appellate hearing scheduled for April that will help determine whether they can seize the assets of a Chevron subsidiary in Canada to force the company to comply with the Ecuador judgment.
“Chevron’s attempt to deny the latest legal petition concerning indigenous rights from being heard is gutless and a sign of the company’s increasing desperation,” said Patricio Salazar, the lead Ecuadorian lawyer for the affected communities.
“The arguments that Chevron is trying to suppress outline in clear terms the numerous ways in which the company has violated international law by polluting indigenous ancestral lands and then deliberately obstructed legitimate efforts to seek compensation through the courts,” said Salazar.
In the legal brief, the Ecuadorian communities cite several provisions of the United Nations Declaration to support their lawsuit to seize Chevron assets in Canada. These include “the right to … prompt decisions through just and fair procedures for the resolution of conflicts” and “fair and equitable compensation” for their territories that have been damaged by oil extraction and other environmental harms.
The U.N. General Assembly approved the Declaration On The Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 by the overwhelming vote of 144-4. The document since has been adopted as domestic law by both Canada and Ecuador, but it obviously did not exist for several years after the litigation against Chevron began in 1993.
Chevron, which sold its assets in Ecuador during the trial, recently had its General Counsel threaten the Ecuadorian communities with a “lifetime of litigation” if they persist in pursing their claims. The case has lasted a whopping 24 years largely because of Chevron’s forum shopping and use of at least 60 law firms and 2,000 legal personnel to file thousands of procedural motions to delay the process at almost every important juncture.
Chevron’s attempt to deny the Ecuadorians the right to file arguments based on indigenous rights – as distinct from simply filing its own legal brief to oppose it – is unusually aggressive, although not surprising given the company’s long record of trying to undermine the claims of the communities. Chevron was found guilty by three layers of courts of Ecuador of having deliberately dumped billions of gallons of toxic oil waste as a cost-saving measure, causing a spike in cancer rates and creating a public health catastrophe. Conditions are so bad that locals call the area the “Amazon Chernobyl”.
For more than two decades, Chevron has tried to block the Ecuadorian communities who live in the Amazon from pressing their claims. The latest Chevron maneuver is to assert that its assets in Canada are immune from collection because they are held by a wholly-owned subsidiary. The communities won the judgment after a hard-fought trial that lasted from 2003 to 2011 and produced 105 technical evidentiary reports relied on by the court to confirm Chevron’s responsibility for the dumping […]
Renowned Aboriginal Rights Lawyer Peter Grant Joining Case Against Chevron on Behalf of Ecuadorian Communities
TORONTO, Oct. 10 /CSRwire/ – Peter Grant, the renowned Canadian aboriginal rights lawyer who recently helped to win a major case before the country’s Supreme Court, is joining the legal team of indigenous groups in Ecuador who are moving to enforce a $12 billion environmental judgment against Chevron in Canadian courts.
“I am honored to represent indigenous persons who have been harmed by the highly irresponsible oil activities of Chevron in the Amazon rainforest of the Ecuador,” said Grant, who just returned from a tour of the affected area of the South American nation with Canadian indigenous leaders Phil Fontaine and Ed John and Greenpeace Co-Founder Rex Weyler.
(See here for a CBC story on the Ecuador visit by Grant and here for comments from Fontaine and Ed John backing collection of the Ecuador judgment.)
“We are going to urge all courts in Canada to reject Chevron’s obstructionist tactics and move this case to a final resolution as soon as possible,” said Grant, who works out of Vancouver. “Twenty-four years of litigation is simply too long for any case, particularly one involving vulnerable First Nations groups who are suffering from cancers and other dramatic health impacts from oil contamination.”
Grant will make his first appearance on the matter today in the Ontario Court of Appeal where argument is scheduled for an 11th hour effort by Chevron’s lawyers to impose a $1 million costs order on the impoverished indigenous groups. The underlying environmental claims originally were filed in 1993, but Chevron has used at least 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers to retaliate against the indigenous groups and to obstruct justice and delay the process both in Ecuador and other countries, said Aaron Marr Page, the longtime U.S. lawyer for the affected communities.
The “Vengeance Phase” of Chevron’s RICO Strategy: Human Rights Supporters Must Speak Out
[ Also up on HuffPost ]
With news that Chevron is aggressively pursuing a $32 million claim against human rights attorney and activist Steven Donziger, it appears we are entering perhaps the ugliest phase of the ugliest corporate countersuit in recent memory—a “vengeance phase” that the company has long been preparing for. The claim is being made in the Chevron RICO case, the oil company’s abusive “SLAPP” lawsuit against Donziger and the victims of its own massive pollution of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
I am also part of the team battling Chevron and have written about the case before, but as quick background: in 2011, Chevron lost an exhaustive 8-year environmental litigation in Ecuador arising on its horrendous operations practices in the country in decades past, and was hit with a $9 billion clean-up liability judgment. In response, it threatened the Ecuadorian indigenous people who had sued it with a “lifetime of collateral litigation” and made good on that promise by bringing a civil RICO or “racketeering” suit against them, falsely claiming the whole environmental case was a “sham.” (You can see pictures and read descriptions of this so-called “sham” here, here, here, here, here…)
But the RICO case wasn’t fundamentally against the Ecuadorian contamination victims, who, the company knew, were and are too sympathetic to carry the full weight of the attacks that Chevron needs to support its ultimate goal of simply not paying an environmental judgment that has now been unanimously affirmed by Ecuador’s Supreme Court. Instead Chevron focused its firepower on Donziger.
Why? Donziger has worked in the trenches of global social justice movements and domestic criminal justice reform his entire career, and he is on the record with some “pointed” views about the intersection of law and power politics. More importantly for Chevron strategists, Donziger was an American and had a personal style that they realized they could use to paint the entire environmental case as being led—or “masterminded, in Chevron’s attack-speak—by the “plaintiffs’ lawyer” bogeyman that decades of propaganda by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Koch bothers’ network have now trained the U.S. public to resent on sight.
An internal Chevron email from 2009 neatly sums up what the author, a leading Chevron strategist, calls the company’s “long-term strategy” for the Ecuador case: “demonize Donziger.”