The oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has agreed to pay a $15.5 million settlement to avoid a trial over its alleged involvement in human rights violations in the Niger Delta. The case was brought on behalf of ten plaintiffs who accused Shell of complicity in the 1995 executions of Nigerian writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others. Ken Saro-Wiwa was the founding member and president of MOSOP, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, a group committed to use nonviolence to stop the repression and exploitation of the Ogoni and their land by Shell and the Nigerian government.
Shell was accused of working closely with and financing the Nigerian military government to brutally quell the peaceful resistance against its presence. The plaintiffs had promised to unveil extensive evidence of Shell’s complicity in the killings during the trial.
The case was brought under the US Alien Torts Claim Act and the Torture Victim Protection Act, which allows foreigners to file cases against Americans for crimes committed abroad. The settlement caps a legal battle that began thirteen years ago, one year after Ken Saro-Wiwa’s murder. The plaintiffs say they’ll put $5 million of the settlement money towards a trust fund benefiting the Ogoni people.
Nigeria has been under military dictatorships for a long time. The oil companies like military dictatorships, because basically they can cheat with these dictatorships. The dictatorships are brutal to people, and they can deny the rights of—human rights of individuals and of communities quite easily, without compunction.
Shell settled because they didn’t want the public exposure of their relationship with the military government and their involvement in human rights abuses in Ogoni and in Nigeria.
There were two people who were injured, or one killed, one injured, in the villages by the military that was accompanying Shell. So that connection is very direct. One woman lost her arm when she was protesting the plowing of her fields and her crops by a Shell contractor. Another man was killed when he was just walking down the road by a military officer who had been brought to his village in a Shell bus in the company of Shell’s security. The others were all—the other decedents, the other people who died, were executed with Ken in 1995. Another person is Michael Vizor, who was tried along with Ken Saro-Wiwa and the others, but was released, but who had been severely tortured during his imprisonment and, in fact, is somewhat disabled by the torture. And, of course, Owens Wiwa, as well.
there’s the general evidence of the partnership between the military government and Shell. There are a lot of documents from Shell, statements by Shell officials, that show how intertwined Shell was with the military government.
Separate from that, there is specific evidence. One is Shell’s participation in the bribing of a witness—of two witnesses against Ken Saro-Wiwa and the others. And the other is a series of conversations between Dr. Owens Wiwa and Brian Anderson, who had been the head of Shell in Nigeria, in which essentially Brian Anderson said, “We can free Ken Saro-Wiwa, we can free your brother, if you will guarantee to stop the campaign, the international campaign against Shell.”
Alien Tort Claims Act, the statute is 200 years old. It permits an alien, someone not born in the United States, to sue for a violation of what’s called the Law of Nations. The Supreme Court has said that the Law of Nations are those things that are universally accepted, have some specific content, and are requirements that are put on all nations, regardless of their willingness to abide by them.
Torture Victim Protection Act
There was a period of time, after the beginning of the modern implementation of the Alien Tort Statute, that it seemed like it wasn’t clear that there would be a—that it would survive, that the modern use of the Alien Tort Statute would survive, and therefore Congress passed the Torture Victim Protection Act, which covers only torture and summary execution, or extrajudicial killing.
Ken Saro-Wiwa, executed November 10th, 1995, along with eight other Ogoni rights activists.
Judith Brown Chomsky, cooperating attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and a lead attorney in the case against Shell.
– from democracynow.org