Indigenous Communities Take Chevron to Global Court for 'Crimes Against Humanity'

[Judi Lynn]

Published on Saturday, October 25, 2014

byCommon Dreams

Indigenous Communities Take Chevron to Global Court for 'Crimes Against Humanity'

Impacted peoples urge International Criminal Court to investigate corporation's refusal clean its mess in the Ecuadorian Amazon

by Sarah Lazare, staff writer

Chevron's repeated refusal to clean up its toxic contamination of Ecuador's Amazon rainforest constitutes an "attack" on civilian populations and should be investigated by the International Criminal Court in the Hague, impacted indigenous and farming communities charged this week in a formal complaint (pdf) to the global body.

“In the context of international criminal law, the decisions made by Chevron’s CEO, John Watson, have deliberately maintained—and contributed to—the polluted environment in which the people of the Oriente region of Ecuador live and die every day,” states the complaint, which was submitted to the ICC's Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda on Thursday on behalf of approximately 80 affected communities, totaling tens of thousands of people.

In 2011, impacted communities won a judgment in an Ecuadorian court against Texaco (acquired by Chevron in 2001) for its toxic waste dumping in the Lago Agrio region in northeastern Ecuador between 1964 and 1992, which created an ongoing environmental and public health crisis, including high cancer rates and reported birth defects among residents. Last year, Ecuador's National Court of Justice upheld the verdict but cut the initial mandated payment from $18 billion to $9.5 billion.

Chevron has repeatedly refused to pay the $9.5 billion ordered by Ecuadorian courts and even took the step of removing most of its assets from Ecuador in an apparent effort to avoid paying. Petitioners slam what they call "multiple collateral attacks against the judgment and the lawyers who represented the affected communities."

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/10/25/indigenous-communities-take-chevron-global-court-crimes-against-humanity.

[Zorro]

1. What is Petroecuador's culpability?

That seems to be ignored in this ongoing litigation.

[Zorro]

2. Murky truth

WHEN a judge writes that an “extraordinary” case “include[s] things that normally come only out of Hollywood”, you can be sure that a book will soon follow. In March Lewis Kaplan, a judge in New York, ruled that a $19 billion award for damages levied by an Ecuadorean court against Chevron, an oil company, was based on fraud. Sure enough, two new works have just come out to clarify a case of unparalleled notoriety and cost.

“Law of the Jungle”, by Paul Barrett, a business journalist, offers a good starting point. His tale goes back to the Wild West atmosphere of Ecuador in 1970, when the military government invited Texaco, an American energy firm, to drill in the Amazon region. The gringos dumped oil-exposed water into streams and pockmarked the land with petroleum-laden pits. For years the government looked the other way while pocketing over 90% of the revenues. However, once it asked Texaco to seal the pits, the firm refused to spend the piddling $4m a clean-up would have cost.

In 1992 Texaco handed its fields to Petroecuador, the state oil company. A year later Steven Donziger, an American lawyer, filed a class-action suit in New York on behalf of indigenous Ecuadoreans he claimed had been poisoned by Texaco’s waste. Following a decade of legal wrangling and the purchase of Texaco by Chevron, the case moved to Ecuador’s courts.

On the surface, the trial’s outcome looked like a triumph for the voiceless victims of greedy foreign capitalists. Chevron argued that Ecuador had released it from its liability after it completed some later clean-up work requested by the government, that the levels of oil-related chemicals in the soil and water were safe and that there was no evidence that Texaco’s byproducts caused any illnesses. But in 2011 the Ecuadorean judge shrugged off these points and handed down a massive judgment. The case made a star of Mr Donziger, who was featured in “Crude”, a fawning 2009 documentary. If the award were enforced, it would also make him rich.

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21620054-story-oil-fraud-and-19-billion-award-damages-murky-truth