17 October 2011
Re-posted from AFP

WASHINGTON — The US Supreme Court said Monday it will consider a lawsuit accusing Royal Dutch Shell of human rights abuses, a case that could make companies liable for torture or genocide committed overseas.

The plaintiffs — relatives of seven Nigerians killed by the country’s former military regime — sued the Anglo-Dutch energy giant and other firms for apparently enlisting the government to suppress resistance to oil exploration in the Niger Delta in the 1990s.

The case will assess the potential liability of corporations — including multinationals with a US presence — under the Alien Tort Statute, a US law dating back to 1789 which scholars say was meant to assure foreign governments that the United States would help prevent breaches of international law.

The 12 Nigerian plaintiffs charge Shell with “complicity in human rights violations committed against them in the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta in Nigeria between 1992 and 1995,” according to their complaint put before the court.

“These violations included torture, extra-judicial executions and crimes against humanity.”

It said Shell “aided and abetted the Nigerian government in committing human rights abuses,” and added: “For the victims of human rights violations such cases often provide the only opportunity to obtain any remedy for their suffering.”

Full article

image credit: Sweet Crude

Read the Reuters piece on the same subject

Oil spills destroyed my village in Nigeria and decades of environmental and social injustice are still to be addressed

by Patrick Naagbanton, Thursday 4 August 2011
Reposted from  guardian.co.uk

Shell’s admission of liability for two massive oil spills in 2008-09 in my village of Bodo in the Niger Delta is a step forward in the long struggle for corporate accountability. An impoverished village that yesterday lay in ruins has today felt a welcome glimmer of hope and justice.

We are happy with the news that Shell could be forced to clean up the environmental devastation it has caused and to pay more than $400m in compensation. But our jubilation is overshadowed by more than five decades of environmental and social injustice yet to be addressed.

Bodo village is a fishing community in the minority Ogoni region of the Niger Delta. Shell was forced out of Ogoni in 1993, following mass protests led by writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed on 10 November 1995 alongside eight other campaigners. Shell’s vast network of oil wells, pipelines, flow-stations and gas flares remained in Ogoni and are an everyday reminder of what we have suffered.

Many of Shell’s rusty, leaky pipelines date back to the 1970s and have been poorly maintained ever since (see pages 31-36 and 43 of Friends of the Earth Netherlands report). It was equipment failure that caused Shell’s high-pressure Trans-Niger pipeline to rupture on 28 August 2008, gushing an estimated 2,000 barrels of oil per day into Bodo for weeks. The land and water was covered in thick layers of crude. Shell was also responsible for a second spill from the same pipeline on 2 February 2009.

Oil spills have effectively destroyed my community. Local farmers and fishers were forced to abandon their traditional ways of life. Bodo Creek is, ecologically speaking, dead. The fish that were not killed by the heavy pollution now reek of petroleum and cannot sustain a village population of 69,000 people. Shell has violated our basic human rights to food, water and livelihood. The compensation Shell offered us – £3,500 plus bags of rice and sugar – was insulting and wholly inadequate.

Full article

Image: Ogoni Spill-Amensty International photos

Ben Amunwa, Niger Delta activist and Platform researcher provides analysis of the conflict, politics and root causes of the Niger Delta crisis. Subjects include the struggle of Ogoni women who succeeded in seeing Shell withdraw from Ogoniland in 1993, the origin of MEND and the December bombings of Ayakoromo.

Watch the full video and join the discussion by adding your comments here.

Nigeria: NNPC to Begin Production On Shell’s Ogoni Oil Wells, by Chika Amanze-Nwachuku, This Day, Allafrica.com, 28 January 2011

image credit: Ken Saro-Wiwa from remember saro-wiwa, http://remembersarowiwa.com

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) said Thursday that the Nigeria Petroleum Development Company (NPDC), its producing arm, will soon commence production from the 30 oil fields belonging to Shell Petroleum Development and Production Company (SPDC) in Ogoniland.

Group Managing Director (GMD) of NNPC, Engr. Austen Oniwon, who confirmed the development in an interview with journalists in Abuja, said the move was in line with the Corporation’s mandate to produce 250,000 barrels of crude oil per day in 2015.

Oniwon said to achieve the set mandate, the NPDC has grown its asset base in three fold preparatory to becoming a big player in the upstream sector, while the enabling environment has been provided by the Federal Government

The SPDC was forced to abandon the prolific oil wells in 1995, following the crisis that greeted the murder of former President of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), Ken Saro-Wiwa.

However, in 2008, the Federal Government announced that the oil fields would be handed over to another operator acceptable by the Ogonis on grounds that there was a total loss of confidence between the Ogoni people and Shell. Government reasoned that the solution to the crisis was to allow an operator acceptable to Ogonis to take over exploration activities in the area.

The pronouncement had pitched Shell against the Federal Government, as the oil giant insisted that it would not hands off those blocks to any operator, other than a Joint Venture partner. Shell had faulted government’s decision and resisted initial plans to hand over the control of the Nigerian oil fields to Chinese oil companies.

After intense lobbying, government named the NPDC as the new operator of the oil blocks, a development, which received the commendation of Shell, which under the NPDC’s operatorship, would continue to be a shareholder in the Ogoniland operations.

The news of the NPDC’s planned commencement of exploration has elicited reactions from Ogoni people, who vowed last month to resist any such moves.

MOSOP President, Mr. Ledum Mitee, told THISDAY recently that the Federal Government was yet to contact the Ogoni people on the planned take-over, insisting that any company that would be allowed to explore oil in Ogoniland must be acceptable by the people of Ogoni.

“I have not been contacted about the plan by the NPDC to begin production, although the government was considering appointing a new operator. Our position as always is that Shell must be replaced. So it is important that government should first discuss whoever will be coming with us. I should expect government to contact us for discussion first and for us to know who is coming what the company stands for and what they are bringing to the table. We don’t want Shell or something like Shell or a company that will work for Shell,” he said.

Also, Ogoni people, under the umbrella of National Union of Ogoni Students, USA, recently cautioned Shell, NPDC and the NNPC against what it described as the danger of back door negotiations with acclaimed stakeholders, and vowed that neither Shell, NPDC nor NNPC would be allowed to operate in the area.

The students in a statement titled “Ogoni Allegations Against the Nigerian Government and Shell”, a copy of which was made available to THISDAY warned against using the security forces to terrorise the people of Ogoni in order to start oil production.

The statement read: “We also discovered that the Rivers State government, NPDC, Shell and the federal authority are making another calculated attempt to start oil production in Ogoni without meeting the demands of the people as stated in the Ogoni Bill of Rights (OBR). They planned to do this through the use of the already established security task forces (Abacha style) coupled with some help from the deceptive works of the UNEP. We strongly advise the Rivers State government to stop using the State security taskforce to terrorise the people of Ogoni in order to start oil production.

“We abhor a repeat of state and corporate sponsored violence that characterised the 1990s’ which was used by the Nigerian government as a pretext to kill prominent Ogoni leaders and over 4000 Ogoni indigenes for demanding their rights. Ogoni students viewed these secret attacks as a sponsored activity by Shell Oil and the authority to resume oil operations in Yorla Oil Fields. We shall be forced to take civil actions against Shell and all those behind these constant threats to the peace of Ogoni”.

Nigeria: U.S. Court Declines to Hear Suit Against Shell, Chika Amanze-Nwachuku, This Day, AllAfrica Global Media, 8 February 2011

A United States Appeal Court on Friday refused to entertain a lawsuit that accused Royal Dutch Shell Plc of helping Nigerian authorities violently to suppress protests against oil exploration in the 1990s.

Specifically, the plaintiffs, families of seven Ogoni indigenes who were executed by the regime of the late General Sani Abacha, had accused the oil giant of violations related to the 1995 hangings of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other protesters by Nigeria’s then-military government.

The Ogoni Nine

In the case – Kiobel et al v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co et al, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Nos. 06-4800 and 06-4876, the plaintiffs had sought their claims from the oil giant under a 1789 U.S. law known as the Alien Tort Statute.

The Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) was adopted in 1789 as part of the original Judiciary Act. It gave the federal courts jurisdiction to hear tort claims brought by foreigners who allege a violation of international law or a treaty to which the United States is a party. For almost two centuries, the statute was relatively dormant, supporting jurisdiction in only a handful of cases. However, it was later invoked in several cases involving torture, disappearances, or killings committed by non-Americans in foreign countries.

In a divided vote that prompted a bitter debate among some of its judges, the US appellate court affirmed a September ruling, which held that companies cannot be liable in U.S. courts for violations of international human rights law.

Reuters reported that the full 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York declined to hear the case by a 5-5 vote and instead left intact the original 2-1 panel ruling from September. Separately, the judges in that panel voted 2-1 not to rehear the case, the report said, added that the Friday ruling may not be the end of the lawsuit.

“The 2nd Circuit is alone among federal circuit courts in concluding that corporations cannot be responsible under U.S. law for human rights violations, ” the newswire quoted an international law professor at George Washington University, Ralph Steinhardt as saying. “This clears the way for the plaintiffs to seek review at the Supreme Court,” he added. The report added that a lawyer who has represented the families, Paul Hoffman, and Shell, did not immediately return requests for comment.

Shell had since denied allegations it is involved in human rights abuses.The 2nd Circuit ruling, the report said, applies in New York, Connecticut and Vermont. The Alien Tort Statute had underpinned other human rights cases. Reuters reported that in one, mining company Rio Tinto Plc was accused of forcing workers in Papua New Guinea to live in “slave like” conditions, and pushing the government to exact retribution after a mine was sabotaged.

The report cited another case where plaintiffs sought to hold Ford Motor Co. General Motors Co. and International Business Machines Corp liable for helping South African authorities when apartheid was in force more than two decades ago.

Friday’s split ruling showed major differences in the judges’ thinking. Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs, part of the September panel that ruled for Shell, wrote that the original ruling “has no great practical effect except for the considerable benefit of avoiding abuse of the courts to extort settlements.”

He chided what he called fears by dissenting Judge Pierre Leval that “slavers and pirates will now rush into corporate transactions,” resulting in “absolution to moral monsters. For the record: even moral monsters are humans, and I would happily see them hanged.” Leval countered that Jacobs’ opinion evinces an “intense, multi-faceted policy agenda” underlying an effort “to exempt corporations from the law of nations.”

The report noted that other judges who favored a rehearing by the entire court said the case presented “a significant issue,” and that September’s ruling conflicted with a 2008 ruling from the 11th Circuit appeals court, which sits in Atlanta.

See another article on this story:  Shell not liable for rights violations, UPI, published: Feb. 8, 2011 at 9:44 AM