Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards

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Posts Tagged ‘Steven Donziger’

Steven Donziger finally free..!

April 29, 2022

Steven Donziger, the human rights lawyer who took on Chevron, spent nearly a thousand days in jail or on house arrest. Amnesty says it was corporate retaliation.

This article originally appeared on 26 April at Common Dreams:

Human rights lawyer Steven Donziger walked free Monday after 993 days of detention stemming from his decades-long legal fight with Chevron, which deployed its vast resources in a campaign to destroy Donziger after he won a $9.5 billion settlement against the fossil fuel giant over its pollution of the Amazon rainforest.

“It’s over. Just left with release papers in hand,” Donziger wrote on Twitter. “Completely unjust that I spent even one day in this Kafkaesque situation. Not looking back. Onward.”

Donziger’s case has attracted global attention and outrage, with the UN high commissioner on human rights calling his prolonged detention a violation of international law. Lawmakers in the United States have also decried Donziger’s prosecution as an “unprecedented and unjust legal assault.” See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/04/14/why-is-the-harvard-administration-so-reluctant-to-speak-up-for-steven-donziger/

“We are relieved that Steven Donziger will finally recover his freedom after almost 1,000 days of arbitrary detention, which included 45 days in prison and over 900 days under house arrest,” Daniel Joloy, senior policy advisor at Amnesty International, said in a statement Monday. “He should have never been detained for even one day, as it has been clear the whole process against him has been in retaliation for his human rights work that exposed corporate wrongdoings.”

“Corporations must not be allowed to continue abusing the U.S. justice system to silence and intimidate human rights defenders or anyone else exposing their wrongdoing,” Joloy added.

…In 2014, a federal judge with ties to Chevron ruled that Donziger was guilty of a “pattern of racketeering activity,” a charge he has denied. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s decision was based on testimony from a witness who later admitted to lying.

https://www.salon.com/2022/04/26/human-rights-lawyer-took-on-chevron-is-finally-free–after-993-days-_partner/

Posted in Amnesty international, Human Rights Defenders | Leave a Comment »
Tags: AI USA, Chevron, Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), House arrest, human rights lawyer, judicial harassment, resource extraction, Steven Donziger, USA

Why is the Harvard Administration so reluctant to speak up for Steven Donziger?

April 14, 2022

Rachel E. Carle, a second-year Master in Public Policy candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, in an oped in the Crimson of 13 April 2022 (entitled Harvard Trains Human Rights Defenders and Then Abandons Them, wants to know why the Harvard Administration has not come out as fiercely to defend Steven Donziger as it has done for others. She makes a good point:

Harvard Law School alum Steven Donziger recently marked his 900th day in detention. Donziger represented victims of oil dumping in a landmark case against Chevron in Ecuador and has since faced serious intimidation and harassment, including mishandling of his trial. [I have written several posts about him, see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/steven-donziger/]

Here at Harvard, Law Professor Charles Nesson has steadfastly spoken out in Donziger’s defense. Harvard Law students joined a letter signed by peers at 55 leading law schools, calling for Donziger’s prosecution to be reviewed. In Fall 2021, with the support of the Human Rights Profession Interest Council at Harvard Kennedy School, I coordinated a petition for Harvard students and alumni to support Donziger that more than 1,600 people have signed onto. This public support is overwhelming, and continued pressure is needed in order for Donziger to achieve justice. So why hasn’t the Harvard administration spoken up?

The school is quick to parade its most controversial alumni. They have no qualms honoring alum Henry A. Kissinger ’50, who orchestrated widespread war crimes in Cambodia. They were eager to invite Harvard drop-out Mark Zuckerberg to give the College’s 2017 Commencement speech, shortly after Facebook’s incriminating role in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Harvard has shown that it is willing to take risks for certain kinds of alumni.

This makes their silence on human rights defenders all the more deafening. Harvard trains students to be leaders and to act courageously to create a better world. Many students in my program at the Harvard Kennedy School graduate into high-risk careers, combatting authoritarianism, fighting for indigenous rights, or working on environmental accountability. Graduates have been detained for their work, from the 1992 imprisonment of HKS alum Jeffrey G. Kitingan in Malaysia to the 2012 imprisonment of HKS alum Bakhtiyar Hajiyev in Azerbaijan.

Just last year, HKS alum Erendro Leichombam was detained in India for a Facebook post criticizing Bharatiya Janata Party members’ approach to Covid-19. While Harvard alumni launched a petition for his release, and the Harvard Graduate Student Union lent its public support, these actions could only go so far.

Harvard alumni have been targeted for their human rights work in the past and will continue to be in the future. They deserve more than one-off petitions and scrambling students. Harvard is one of the most powerful educational institutions in the world; surely we can do more.

These targeted alumni are a part of a larger story. 2020 was the deadliest year on record for environmental activists around the world, particularly for Indigenous people and the Global South. Of course, those who graduate from Harvard schools have privileges and protections not afforded to many. Donziger is a white American man with a Harvard Law degree who benefits from respectability politics, and we should critically consider why his case has received more attention than most.

But that is just it. The more we understand and leverage the connections between these cases, the more human rights defenders can receive the attention and advocacy they deserve. These are not isolated incidents. When the next HKS or HLS alum is inevitably threatened or detained, I hope we remember they are connected to a long lineage of targeted alumni and a vast community of targeted activists around the world.

Harvard has taken an important step with the Scholars at Risk program, established more than 20 years ago to offer respite to persecuted scholars, artists, and writers from around the world. Harvard should expand this commitment, devoting significant resources to the defense of human rights, with particular attention to indigenous, women, queer, poor, and otherwise marginalized activists.

It is time to support our alumni at risk, too. Harvard should develop contingency plans that allow the administration to evaluate a situation, get in touch with the detained alum’s close contacts, and consider a range of private and public support measures. At the very least, the administration should be receptive to student campaigns that request the school to make a public statement or intervene in support of a member of our community.

Harvard needs to take responsibility for the human rights defenders it trains. It needs to create a real, ongoing, accessible infrastructure of support. And it needs to start today.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/4/13/carle-harvard-human-rights-defenders/

Posted in human rights, Human Rights Defenders | 2 Comments »
Tags: academic, Erendro Leichombam, Harvard Law School, Harvard University, Human Rights Defenders, Jeffrey G. Kitingan, Jeffrey G. Kitingan in Malaysia to the 2012 imprisonment of HKS alum Bakhtiyar Hajiyev, Rachel E. Carle, Scholars at Risk, Steven Donziger

100 NGOs join Amnesty International’s call for Biden to pardon Steven Donziger

March 16, 2022
Amnesty International Logotype

For more than two years, human rights lawyer Steven Donziger – currently serving the remainder of a six month sentence on house arrest – has been arbitrarily detained in apparent retaliation for his work to hold Chevron accountable for its deliberate dumping of more than 16 billion gallons of toxic oil waste into the Amazon rainforest. Despite repeated calls from human rights advocates and governmental authorities for Donziger’s release, the Department of Justice has refused to respond or take any action to remedy this human rights violation. Today, over 100 human rights and environmental organizations from around the world joined Amnesty International, Greenpeace USA, Amazon Watch, Global Witness, Rainforest Action Network, HEDA Resource Center, ReCommon, and the Pachamama Alliance to call on President Biden to exercise his clemency powers to pardon Steven Donziger as a way to ensure his immediate release.

In a letter to President Biden, the organizations state: “More than four months since a discerning opinion by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention that found Steven Donziger’s detention to be arbitrary, U.S. judicial authorities have thus far failed to take any action to remedy the situation and implement the Working Group’s call to ensure Mr. Donziger’s  immediate release.”  See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/08/17/steven-donziger-speaks-out-himself-about-being-targetted-by-chevron

In a statement in October 2021, President Biden promised the U.S. would “stand in solidarity with, and continue to work tirelessly in support of, the activists, human rights defenders, and peaceful protestors on the front lines of the struggle between freedom and tyranny.”All the while, the administration has failed to side with the brave human rights defenders within the United States and respond to the demand of the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Congress, and the international community to free Steven Donziger. 

“Steven Donziger is a human rights defender that bravely stood up against one of the most powerful corporations in the world,” said Daniel Joloy of Amnesty International. “In response, he has endured years of harassment, intimidation, smear campaigns and more than two years in arbitrary detention. President Biden must now listen to the over 100 human rights and environmental organizations calling to pardon Steven Donziger and ensure he is released immediately and unconditionally. Allowing this ordeal to continue only sends a chilling message that corporations around the world can continue attacking human rights defenders without consequences.”

Paul Paz y Miño of Amazon Watch said “Instead of supporting the people of Ecuador who were poisoned by Chevron’s admitted deliberate dumping of billions of gallons of toxic waste, Biden has turned a blind eye to the persecution of a key lawyer who worked to win a historic judgment against Chevron. The U.S. government’s responsibility should be to make Chevron clean up its waste and support efforts to hold the fossil fuel company accountable, not allow the appointment of a private prosecutor with ties to the very same oil company to imprison human rights lawyer Steven Donziger. This travesty has gone on for over two years, and Biden has ignored members of the E.U. parliament, members of the House and Senate, and even the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Well over 100 organizations are now demanding action, and Biden’s lack of action continues to be a dark stain on his alleged claims to respect human rights. Oil companies do not prosecute and imprison people in the U.S. This must end now.”

Chevron’s legal attack on Donziger is not the first, nor will it be the last case of its kind. Right now, the right to dissent is being repressed by both our government and corporations

Annie Leonard, co-Executive Director Greenpeace USA

Simon Taylor, Co-Founder & Director, Global Witness said “I have spent much of the past 25 years seeking accountability of the fossil fuel industry for its gross human rights abuses and other crimes. Amongst the judicial authorities we have liaised with during this time, the Southern District of New York has stood as a beacon in this fight against criminality. Shockingly, just as Biden gears up this struggle, New York’s judicial authorities seem instead intent on destroying their reputation, thanks to their apparent complicity in the unprecedented corporate prosecution and judicial harassment of Steven Donziger. These acts, in my experience, are more what I would expect from one of the ‘Banana Republics’ we have investigated around the world. These are shameful acts. If Biden is serious about tackling the climate crisis, he cannot allow the fossil fuel industry to weaponise the US judicial system to go after its detractors – Biden must act now and release Steven Donziger.”

USA: Over 100 environmental and human rights organizations join Amnesty International’s call for Biden to pardon Steven Donziger

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/03/15/100-groups-urge-biden-pardon-human-rights-lawyer-steven-donziger

Posted in Amnesty international, human rights, Human Rights Defenders, UN | 2 Comments »
Tags: Amnesty International, Ecuador, environmental defenders, joint statement, NGOs, resource extraction, Steven Donziger, USA

Steven Donziger speaks out himself about being targetted by Chevron

August 17, 2020
Mongabay of 15 August 2020 carries a piece by Steven Donziger himself [about whom i posted recently: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/08/10/steven-donziger-human-rights-defender-now-victim-of-judicial-harassment/] entitled: Don’t Let Big Oil Open a New Front in Its War on Environmental Defenders. “Chevron clearly wants me confined so I can no longer work on the case or speak publicly about the company’s gross wrongdoing.”
In the Pozo Aguarico region of Ecuador, lawyer Maria Cecilia Herrera shows the oil pollution that remains in the ground 30 years after oil production ceased. Photograph by Enrico Aviles, 2020.

In the Pozo Aguarico region of Ecuador, lawyer Maria Cecilia Herrera shows the oil pollution that remains in the ground 30 years after oil production ceased. Photograph by Enrico Aviles, 2020.

After recalling the work and death of his friend Rosan Steve relates how the culprit, the oil giant Chevron, has been pursuing a scorched-earth campaign to avoid paying for the cleanup or helping any of the victims. In the process, Chevron and its main law firm – Gibson Dunn – has pioneered a new, highly unethical form of lawfare intended to intimidate environmental defenders in all 180 countries where it operates. I should know; I’m the main target of Chevron’s lawfare, which has involved 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers.

Here’s some of the backstory. Multiple courts have found that from the late 1960s to 1992, Texaco deliberately dumped billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste across 1,500 square miles of previously pristine rainforest, poisoning groundwater and rivers residents depended on for drinking, bathing, and fishing. Texaco, which was later acquired by Chevron, told local Indigenous peoples that the toxic waste was actually good for them, saying it would “nourish the brain and retard aging.”

In 1993, a coalition of 30,000 Indigenous peoples and rural communities fought back. The father of one of my Harvard Law School classmates asked me to join the team of Ecuadorian and American lawyers representing them. After hearing from leaders like Rosa and seeing the damage with my own eyes, I was appalled by what Texaco had done to these communities. Unlike BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, this disaster was no accident. It was done by design to externalize production costs onto some of the most vulnerable communities on the planet—the very people whose historical role is to act as the guardians of the forest.

After years of fighting in courts in the U.S., Ecuador, and Canada, the coalition won an unprecedented $9.5B in damages. Several appellate courts and a total of 17 appellate judges affirmed the case unanimously, and Canada’s Supreme Court ruled the Ecuadorians had the right to enforce their judgment. Human-rights champions hailed the victory as the beginning of a new era of environmental accountability.

But then Chevron unveiled another component of its strategy to try to prevent the Indigenous plaintiffs from receiving a cent. The central feature was filing a civil RICO suit in U.S. federal court against me as well as all 47 Ecuadorian community leaders who signed the lawsuit, claiming that the entire case on which I had spent 18 years of my life had been nothing more than a “racketeering” conspiracy designed to “extort” money from the company. Judge Lewis Kaplan denied us a jury, refused to review any of the voluminous scientific proof of Chevron’s pollution, and then ruled in Chevron’s favor. He based his decision almost completely on the testimony of a man who later admitted to lying repeatedly under oath and to receiving huge payments from the company.

I continue to challenge Kaplan’s flawed decision, which has been rejected by multiple appellate courts in Ecuador and Canada. But largely because I would not turn over my computer and cell phone to Chevron (an order that many experts believe to be a violation of attorney-client privilege and one that I have appealed), Kaplan tried to prosecute me criminally for contempt. His charges were rejected by the federal prosecutor. Kaplan then took the extraordinarily rare step of appointing a private law firm, Seward & Kissel, to prosecute and detain me in the name of the government. Seward & Kissel later admitted that Chevron is actually a client of the law firm.

While I await my day in court, I’m now under house arrest. (I believe I’m the only lawyer in U.S. history detained pretrial on a contempt charge.) I’ve been confined to my small apartment for 12 months on a charge that carries a maximum of six months’ imprisonment. This has been incredibly hard on my 14-year old son as well as my clients, who have been denied their lawyer. Chevron clearly wants me confined so I can no longer work on the case or speak publicly about the company’s gross wrongdoing.

One thing that keeps me going is the fact that hundreds of top human-rights lawyers and dozens of Nobel Laureates have sprung to my defense. They see this abuse of power as the latest example of corporations trying to criminalize environmental activism. They know the use of corporate lawfare to target activists has been copied by a mining company in South Africa, a pipeline company in the U.S., and a logging company in Canada.

Two weeks ago, two retired U.S. federal judges provided a big boost. The Hon. Nancy Gertner (Harvard Law School) and the Hon. Mark Bennett (Drake University Law School) criticized their former colleague Kaplan in the news journal Law360 for the way he’s handled this case. I’m grateful for their courage, because it’s extremely rare for federal judges to call out colleagues publicly.

Please vote with your wheels and fill up your tank anywhere but Chevron. And I hope governments around the world will stand up to attempts to criminalize peaceful activism. They can start by refusing to do business with Chevron until the company learns to respect the rule of law and ceases its attacks on human rights defenders. We must not let this targeting of human rights defenders spread as quickly as the toxins that killed Rosa and the men, women, children whose names filled her notebook.

Steven Donziger

Steven Donziger is a human-rights advocate based in New York City. He can be followed on Twitter at @SDonziger. His legal defense fund is at www.donzigerdefense.com and Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía’s web site is makechevroncleanup.com

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/15/dont-let-big-oil-open-new-front-its-war-environmental-defenders

See also later: https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/a-new-justice-movement-emerges-to-defend-steven-donziger/

as well as

https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/steven-donziger-chevron-sentencing/

Posted in Human Rights Defenders | 1 Comment »
Tags: Chevron, Common Dreams, environmental defenders, human rights lawyer, judicial harassment, Mongabay, pollution, resource extraction, Steven Donziger, Texaco

Steven Donziger: human rights defender now victim of judicial harassment

August 10, 2020

Rex Weyler in Mother Jones of 10 August 2020 produced a fascinating piece on Steven Donziger a human rights lawyer who took on Chevron in Ecuasor and won, but himself ended up under house arrest.(This piece was originally published in Canada’s National Observer and appears here as part of the Climate Desk Partnership.)

Steven Donziger, gestures during a press conference on March 19, 2014 in Quito, Ecuador.Rodrigo Buendia/Getty

Last September, I travelled from Western Canada to New York City to see the human rights lawyer Steven Donziger. Donziger cannot travel. He cannot even stroll the hallway of his Upper West Side apartment building on 104th Street without special court permission. He remains under house arrest, wearing an ankle bracelet. Eight years ago, Donziger and a team of Ecuadorian lawyers, on behalf of Indigenous and farmer plaintiffs, won the largest human rights and environmental court judgment in history, a $9.5-billion US verdict against the Chevron Corporation for massive oil pollution in Ecuador’s Amazon basin.

Following the trial, Chevron removed its assets from Ecuador, left the country, and has refused to pay. The company now claims the Ecuador verdict was achieved fraudulently, and produced a witness, who told a US court that he possessed knowledge of a bribe. Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled in Chevron’s favour, halting collection of the pollution fine in the US and placing Donziger in electronic chains in his home.

The details in this case really matter, so here the story in full:

Crime and punishment

Donziger, born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1961, graduated from Harvard Law in 1991, and founded Project Due Process, offering legal services to Cuban refugees. In 1993, Ecuador’s Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía (FDA), representing 30,000 victims of Chevron’s pollution, heard about Donziger and asked him to help win compensation for their lost land, polluted water, and epidemics of cancer and birth defects in a region now known as the “Amazon Chernobyl.”

Donziger originally filed the claim in New York, but Chevron insisted the case be heard in Ecuador, where the trial began in 1993.

Evidence showed that between 1964 and 1992, Texaco (now Chevron) dumped 16 billion gallons of toxic wastewater into rivers and pits. Fifty-four judicial site inspections confirmed that the average Chevron waste pit in Ecuador contained 200 times the contamination allowed by US and world standards, including illegal levels of barium, cadmium, copper, mercury, lead, and other metals that can damage the immune and reproductive systems and cause cancer. According to Amazon Watch, by ignoring regulations, the company saved about $3 per barrel of oil, earning an extra $5 billion over 20 years.

In 2007, during the trial, Chevron stated that if the victims pursued the case, they faced a “lifetime of … litigation.” The plaintiffs persevered. Since the victims were dirt poor, Donziger and his team, with FDA support, devised an innovative solution to fund the case, offering investors a tiny portion of any eventual settlement.

“I believe the injustice to him is intended to intimidate the rest of us, to chill the work of other environmental and corporate accountability advocates.”

In 2011, after an eight-year trial, the court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. Two appeals courts and the nation’s Supreme Court, the Court of Cassation, confirmed the decision. Seventeen appellate judges ruled unanimously that Chevron was responsible for the contamination and owed Donziger’s clients $9.5 billion.

The lone witness

According to court documents, Chevron “refus(ed) to comply” with the judgment and began to make good on its threat for a “lifetime of litigation.” According to internal company memos, Chevron launched a retaliatory campaign to attack the victims, discredit Ecuador’s courts, and “demonize” Donziger.

Chevron hired one of the world’s most notorious law firms, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher—previously censured by England’s High Court of Justice for fabricating evidence. Judges in California, Montana, and New York have censured and fined Gibson Dunn for such misbehavior as witness tampering, obstruction, intimidation, and what one judge called “legal thuggery.”

Using US RICO statutes designed to prosecute organized crime syndicates, the firm filed a “racketeering” case against Donziger. Judge Kaplan at the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York—a former tobacco company lawyer widely viewed as being friendly to large corporations—agreed to hear the peculiar case. Kaplan claimed the Ecuador trial “was not a bona fide litigation” and insulted the victims, calling them “so-called plaintiffs.” Gibson Dunn lawyer Randy Mastro called the Ecuador courts “a sham.”

Prominent trial lawyer John Keker, representing Donziger, claimed the Kaplan trial was pure intimidation and called the proceedings a “Dickensian farce” driven by Kaplan’s “implacable hostility” toward Donziger.

On the eve of the trial, Chevron dropped its financial claims, allowing Kaplan to dismiss the jury and decide the outcome himself. Then Chevron unveiled their star witness—Alberto Guerra, a disgraced former Ecuadorian judge removed from the bench for accepting bribes. In a Chicago hotel room, Chevron and Gibson Dunn lawyers rehearsed Guerra for 53 days.

In Kaplan’s court, Guerra claimed that Donziger had approved a “bribe” to an Ecuadorian judge and had written the final court ruling for the judge, allegedly transferred on a computer thumb drive. No corroborating evidence was ever offered. Guerra later admitted lying about these facts, and a forensic investigation of the Ecuadorian judge’s computer proved that Guerra had lied.

The entire story now appears fabricated. Donziger’s lawyers have attempted to locate Guerra and depose him, but the star witness has not yet been found.

“Chevron’s case,” said Donziger’s lawyer Andrew Frisch, “rested on the testimony of a witness who was paid over $1 million.” Frisch stated that Kaplan’s rulings “have been contradicted in whole or in part by 17 appellate judges in Ecuador and 10 in Canada, including unanimous decisions of the highest courts in both countries.”

Nevertheless, without a jury, Kaplan accepted Guerra’s testimony and found that Donziger had committed fraud. Finally, Kaplan ordered Donziger to turn over his computer and cellphone to Chevron. Since this order violated attorney-client confidentiality, Donziger refused until the court of appeals could decide the issue.

Kaplan charged Donziger with “criminal contempt” for refusing his order. However, the order and the contempt charge were so outrageous that the N.Y. prosecutor’s office refused to accept the case. Kaplan defied the state authorities and appointed a private law firm, Seward & Kissel—with commercial ties to Chevron—to act as prosecutor, which, in turn, ordered Donziger be placed under “pretrial home detention.”

Legal thuggery

An unnamed New York Second Circuit judge—presumed by Donziger and his lawyers to be Kaplan—filed a complaint against Donziger with the bar grievance committee in New York, which then suspended Donziger’s law license without a hearing. However, bar referee and former federal prosecutor John Horan called for a hearing and recommended the return of Donziger’s law license. “The extent of his pursuit by Chevron is so extravagant, and at this point so unnecessary and punitive,” Horan wrote, “he should be allowed to resume the practice of law.” Donziger responded that, “Any neutral judicial officer who looks objectively at the record almost always finds against Chevron and Kaplan. The tide is turning and the hard evidence about the extreme injustice in Kaplan’s court will be exposed.”

This case appears to be about bullying. Chevron is one of the wealthiest corporations in the world. The plaintiffs are poor, Indigenous, and campesino people with scarce access to money or lawyers. “Donziger came to our rescue,” says FDA president Luis Yanza. How big can high-stakes corporate bullying get? Donziger’s lawyers estimate the oil giant has spent over $2 billion on 2,000 lawyers, public relations teams, and private investigators.

At the dinner party at Donziger’s, I met supporters from around the world, from Amazon Watch and Global Witness, journalists, lawyers, and human rights advocates. “This case is not just about Steven’s fate,” said Simon Taylor, director of Global Witness in London. “I believe the injustice to him is intended to intimidate the rest of us, to chill the work of other environmental and corporate accountability advocates.”

American human rights attorneys Martin Garbus and Charles Nesson formed a support committee for Donziger with dozens of civil society leaders, including: Clive Stafford-Smith, founder of the prisoner-rights group Reprieve in London; Atossa Soltani and Leila Salazar, the founder and executive director of Amazon Watch; Lynne Twist, co-founder of the Pachamama Alliance working in the Amazon; renowned author John Perkins; and famed musician Roger Waters.

The tide may be turning for Donziger and the victims in Ecuador. In June 2019, Amnesty International asked the US Department of Justice to conduct a criminal investigation into Chevron’s and Gibson Dunn’s conduct, witness bribery, and fraud in the Ecuador pollution litigation

This past February, Prof. Ellen Yaroshefsky, director of the Monroe H. Freedman Institute for the Study of Legal Ethics at Hofstra University in New York, wrote that the Kaplan and Seward & Kissel prosecution of Donziger is flawed with conflicts of interest, financial ties to Chevron Corporation, and judicial bias.

In April, 29 Nobel laureates signed a letter stating, “(We) support Steven Donziger and the Indigenous peoples and local communities in Ecuador in their decades-long work to achieve environmental justice over pollution caused by Chevron…. Chevron and a pro-corporate judicial ally, US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, manufactured ‘contempt’ charges against Donziger. (Chevron’s) goal is to intimidate and disempower the victims of its pollution and a lawyer who has worked for decades on their behalf.”

A month later, more than 475 international lawyers, bar associations, and human rights advocates criticized Kaplan’s ruling for persecuting Donziger “based on false witness testimony provided by Chevron, personal animus, and… to protect Chevron from a valid foreign court judgment.” The letter, from the US National Lawyers Guild and the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, urges an end to the pretrial house arrest of Donziger, noting “such arbitrary detention sets a dangerous precedent for human rights attorneys in the United States and around the world.”

On May 27, 2020, the Newground investment firm in Seattle, Wash., placed two proposals on Chevron’s 2020 proxy call, asking for governance reforms to bring its Ecuador issues to resolution, and prevent future human rights and pollution liabilities. The proposals were supported by actor Alec Baldwin, musician Roger Waters, and Nobel laureate Jody Williams.

On July 16, the European Parliament wrote to the US Congress asking the Congressional Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties to investigate Chevron’s treatment of Donziger, which the EU Parliament found “not consistent with what has traditionally been the strong support in the United States for the rule of law generally and for protection for human rights defenders in particular.”

Late at night, in the Donziger home, after the supporters had left, Donziger and his wife Laura sipped wine. “We’re not giving up,” Donziger said. “The only fraud in this case has been conducted by Chevron. Modern nations have comity relationships, formally respecting each other’s court decisions. We’re reviewing enforcement actions in Canada, Australia, and other jurisdictions. Chevron owes the money, and they can’t just run, hide, and fabricate stories to avoid paying. They’re persecuting me to try to change the public narrative, but they’re guilty. They committed the crime, they hurt people, they were proven responsible in a court of law that they chose, and they owe the money.”

…..As I write this, in mid-July, Donziger has been in home detention for 345 days, almost a year, longer than any lawyer in US history has ever served for a contempt charge.

How Did a Lawyer Who Took on Big Oil and Won End up Under House Arrest?

Posted in Human Rights Defenders | 1 Comment »
Tags: Chevron, Ecuador, environmental issues, House arrest, human rights lawyer, judicial harassment, malicious prosecution, Mother Jones, oil industry, pollution, retaliation, Steven Donziger, Texaco

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