“No Shell person or NNPC has come here in respect of the report. But as I talk to you, they are drilling. The same Nigerian Army and police that are supposed to protect the Nigerian people will carry them to go and put more benzene (into the environment). If we take laws into our hands, you hear (restiveness) and violence.” The accusations have been put before Shell in an email for weeks, but the company did not respond.

Graphics from Guardian newspaper article: Unloveable Shell, the Goddess of Oil

PRESS STATEMENT ISSUED BY MOSOP: 26 December 2011

A measure to make sure that Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Royal Dutch/Shell and others face compelling action to hold them accountable for environmental crimes in Ogoni.

MOSOP President and Spokesman, Dr. Goodluck Diigbo said that the Ogoni people have learnt the hardest lesson that it was not the wisest thing to do, to allow petroleum operations in Ogoni without a formal Environmental Impact Assessment Study (EIAS).

He said other relevant companies must be required to conduct EIAS to merit continual operations in Ogoni.

Dr. Diigbo said this today, 24th December, 2011 during a MOSOP inter-kingdom assembly held at Akpajo, Eleme near Port Harcourt. He, then, announced the establishment of an Ogoni Environmental Protection Agency (OGEPA), headed by Mr. John Lar-Wisa.

Tambari Deekor
Associate Editor, MOSOP Media
tdeekor88@gmail.com

STATEMENT BY MOSOP MEDIA 1 December 2011 21:26:50 GMT

MOSOP President/Spokesman, Dr. Goodluck Diigbo today welcomed the indication of interest by the E.U. – U.S. economic blocs in the immediate environmental restoration of Ogoniland, but described the blocs’ list of parties for engagement as one-sided; as it excluded the victims – the Ogoni people.

Tambari Deekor
Associate Editor, MOSOP MEDIA

Native oath-of-office ceremony for 3,000 representatives

STATEMENT ISSUED BY MOSOP MEDIA: 30 November 2011 13:15 GMT

As Native Authority is sworn-in with 3,000 villagers under oath to provide grassroots leadership to enforce the United Nations Universal Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), the President/Spokesman of the Movement for Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), MOSOP President /Spokesman, Dr. Goodluck Diigbo, has said that as ordinary Ogoni peasants often despised and exploited take over local governance from the corrupt Nigerian local government system, it will confirm that no sacrifice for freedom, is ever in vain.

Dr. Diigbo spoke today, Tuesday, 29th November, 2011, at the Ken Saro-Wiwa Peace and Freedom Center, Bori, during a native oath-of-office ceremony for 3,000 representatives, voted into village councils by villagers throughout Ogoniland, according to each village electoral process. “The Ogoni Central Indigenous Authority (OCIA), represents a big pro-active investment to address petroleum-related conflicts that threaten international peace from within Nigeria, and other acts of aggression directed at the non-violent Ogoni people by Nigerian rulers,” Diigbo remarked.

Dr. Diigbo vowed that Ogoni people under MOSOP are fully prepared to back the OCIA in order to restore and save Ogoniland, as Ogonis cannot wait for 25 – 30 years, which the disputed UNEP Ogoniland Environmental Assessment Report says will take to restore Ogoniland, already, devastated by 55 years of irresponsible petroleum operations.

“This authority is not new because Ogoni was merely returning to its original Native Authority status, which was operational in 1948, but forcefully dismantled by the new Nigerian nation state in 1960. We are taking lawful native and international approach; nonviolently and peacefully, but firmly poised to not giving up,” MOSOP President declared. “Our greatest concern is the NNPC steady conspiracy with Royal Dutch/Shell, Chevron and other oil companies, to continually commit environmental crimes and engage in persistent violations of the indigenous rights of the Ogoni people,” Diigbo stated.

On the institutional framework, Diigbo explained that OCIA has reactivated and consolidated sixteen old structures from its original 96 political native sub-sets of 1948, and that the elected representatives from villages throughout Babbe, Eleme, Gokana, Kenkhana, Nyokana and Tai Kingdoms as well as Bori and Ban – Ogoni administrative units are to prepare grounds to replace the imposed local government system which has so far existed as channels for looting of public funds and organized crime. Elected village representatives will now elect members of the kingdom management teams in an electoral college, while those elected to the kingdoms; will in turn, elect members of the Ogoni Central Indigenous Authority (OCIA), in which any Ogoni person, at home or abroad, will be free to vie for position, but through nomination filed by the village of origin.

Explaining how the system works, Dr. said that the power to elect or remove any elected representative rests with each village electoral process, which will define change and nurture effective grassroots leadership that is accountable to the people. On why Nigeria ignores the demands of the Ogoni people, Diigbo explained that Nigeria has conflict of interest with the Charter of the United Nations, which guided the September 13, 2007 Universal Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

Diigbo said that Nigeria as a multi-ethnic nation state, without a formal Sovereign National Conference, has continued to survive because of the rights and privileges it enjoys from the United Nations Charter, but for Nigeria to persistently violate the same Charter, which it has previously signed; is to shoot itself in the foot. On what he described as “local government embedded corruption”, Dr. Diigbo explained that influential politicians at the national and state levels often plant stooges in the local system, and in turn use them as pressure points to get money from State and National coffers; while they get back such monies from their stooges and paid contractors without any job done. The politicians will have to return to their villages to seek fresh mandate under the OCIA, while local government employees will be retained to play vital role in City Hall or Village Council administration, Diigbo added.

UNEP Ogoniland Environmental Assessment Report, is ship without a rudder, says MOSOP President Goodluck Diigbo

In an interview on why Dutch Cabinet has asked Nigeria and not Royal Dutch/Shell to clean up oil spills and restore devastated lands in Ogoniland, MOSOP President Diigbo said: “I can’t speak for Dutch parliament or cabinet, but the UNEP Ogoniland Assessment Report is a like ship without a rudder, it can be tossed back and forth, because it did not follow due process that plugs loopholes. Nigeria’s responsibility is very obvious to me, but this was why I called for joint stakeholders’ review, while others continue to shout implement, as if you can fetch water with a basket. No foreign oil company can do what has been done in Ogoniland without the consent of the home government. The Nigerian government and oil companies are partners in crime. “

Hon. Dum Ade John Budam
Secretary General, Movement for Survival of Ogoni People, MOSOP
mosopint@gmail.com /mosopmedia@gmail.com

Graphic from the Guardian article “Unloveable Shell, the Goddess of Oil“

Dear Editor,

Please run article clarifying the location of Ogoni people in Kiobel v. Shell. This issue was brought up in one recent publication of Nov. 17, 2011, posted or culled to your credible and number one globally read and researched-based Website.

THE ARTICLE: How Suing Shell Could Backfire on Human Rights Activists

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Ben Ikari.

ARTICLE

I read with interest a publication by Reuters that is published on this esteemed Website: Royaldutchshellplc.com and dated November 17, 2011. As recorded on paragraph nine, lines six and seven. According to Maria LaHood, “Indigenous Ogoni people, most of whom probably live in  villages in rural Nigeria, are challenging one of the most powerful entities in the world.”

No corporate liability will be tantamount to more corporate and states’ torture (aiding and abetting) and genocide among other egregious crimes with which $hell is charged. As conscious world citizens, we must not let $hell and others kill again, as we hold them accountable!

Nov 17 2011, 9:00 AM ET

International groups have long been using a 1789 tort to sue corporations for acts on foreign soil. An upcoming Supreme Court case might put an end to that.

REUTERS

This past October, a 15-year legal battle between Royal Dutch Petroleum and a Nigerian political movement finally went before the Supreme Court — of the United States, that is. On October 17, the Court decided to hear a lawsuit filed by Esther Kiobel, whose husband, Dr. Barinem Kiobel, was one of nine activists from the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People hanged by Sana Abacha’s military government on November 10, 1995. Kiobel alleges Shell was partly responsible for her husband’s death, and for other human rights violations committed in the oil-rich Ogoniland region.

Esther Kiobel’s lawsuit against Shell is hardly a standard Supreme Court case. After all, Kiobel v. Dutch Royal Petroleum involves a foreign national suing an Anglo-Dutch oil company, and the violations were allegedly committed by a foreign government on foreign soil. But the case landed in U.S. court because of a much-debated, sentence-long statute in the Judiciary Act of 1789, a law whose meaning and scope is still hotly contested.

The Alien Tort Statute states, “The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.” In other words, U.S. courts have jurisdiction over cases involving American citizens’ alleged violations of “the law of nations,” or international law.

The question the Supreme Court will ponder in the Kiobel case is whether American courts  can be held liable under international law – in this case, a multinational company with a major American presence. Royal Dutch Petroleum is headquartered in The Hague and has its registered office in London. But its U.S. subsidiary, Shell Oil, accounts for 15 percent of its gas and oil business.

The U.S. court system is an imperfect recourse for human rights advocates, but if the Supreme Court affirms the ability to sue multinational corporations, it could become an important one. “U.S. courts are not particularly fabulous with international law,” says Kayleen Hartman, a post-graduate fellow at Georgetown University Law School’s Human Rights Institute, “but it’s important to have a remedy in U.S. courts because every company is here.”

On September 17, 2010, the Second Circuit court stunned legal observers by determining that the ATS does not allow individuals to sue corporations. The two-to-one decision, which held that the “law of nations” doesn’t include corporate liability, broke with 15 years of case precedent and four other circuit-level federal courts. Maria LaHood of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which submitted an Amicus brief on behalf of Kiobel, disagrees with the court’s decision.  ”You look to general principles of law of nations, and corporations can be held liable,” she says. “Nobody even thought this was an open question until the [Second Circuit's] Kiobel decision came down.”

Human rights activists have already used the Alien Tort Statute to sue corporations. For instance, in 2004, the non-profit group Earths Rights International successfully sued the energy company Unocal for its alleged cooperation with the Burmese military junta. That same year, the Supreme Court affirmed that human rights violations could be the subject of ATS suits, though only if they were the kinds of very serious abuses banned under “customary international law.” In Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, a partial win for human rights advocates, the Court decreed that rigidly defined crimes like genocide or torture could be the subject of an ATS suit. Less-established legal concepts, such as environmental degradation or violence against women, could not.

If the Supreme Court sides against Kiobel, the scope of the Alien Tort Statute could severely narrow. Paul Hoffman, who is the lead attorney for Kiobel and also argued Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, says limiting the application of ATS would reinforce the corporations’ sense of impunity. “What’s at stake is the very important principle that if there’s a corporation involved in very serious human rights violations, are we going to shut the courthouse door on the victims trying to get accountability for those violations?” Hoffman, who is a member of Amnesty International’s International Executive Committee, adds, “If [the Supreme Court justices] affirm the Second Circuit decision that these cases can’t be brought at all, then if there’s another IG Farben in today’s world, they would get a pass,” referring to the German producer of Zyklon B gas used in Nazi concentration camps.

Another possible consequence of the case, according to LaHood, is that if the court decides against Kiobel, it will curtail the accepted principle that international law can and does have a role in U.S. court. As long ago as 1900, in the landmark Paquete Habana v. United States decision, the Supreme Court determined that customary international law is relevant to the U.S. legal system. “It’s no different for the court to determine and interpret international law than any other type of law,” LaHood says.

Arguably, closing U.S. courts to foreign nationals suing American-based companies goes against the long-accepted idea that international law has a place in the American legal system. LaHood believes that in this case, a limited view of the role of international law in the U.S. would simply be a means of protecting corporations from civil exposure. “Indigenous Ogoni people, most of whom probably live in villages in rural Nigeria, are challenging one of the most powerful entities in the world,” says LaHood. “Corporations don’t like it. They don’t want to be held accountable for how they behave in developing countries.”

But how exactly did Shell “behave,” and does that particular behavior make the company liable? In 1990, the Ogoni people, an ethnic group with about 500,000 members living in an oil-producing region of the eastern Niger Delta, spearheaded a major protest movement. Their activism targeted both the oil companies and the Nigerian military government, which owned 55 percent of Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary. “They felt as if they needed to have control over their land, their resources and their political autonomy” says Deirdre LaPin, a development scholar who worked with both USAID and Shell in Nigeria during the 1990s. “It was something of an Arab Spring. There are strong parallels.”

Although the Ogoni were a relatively small population in a region of over 30 million people, eloquent and charismatic Ogoni leaders, like writer and television personality Ken Saro-Wiwa, help popularize the movement. In 1993, about 300,000 people attended an Ogoni Day rally in the Nigerian town of Bori; later that year, amid increasing unrest, Shell suspended all of its operations in Ogoni areas.

The Abacha dictatorship was keen on preventing the situation in Ogoniland from spiraling out of control, regardless of the cost. “Gradually there was a larger and larger presence of the military in the region and there was a joint task force which was assigned to the Ogoni area,” says LaPin. In 1995, Abacha ordered the execution of the nine most prominent members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, including Ken Saro-Wiwa.

The Kiobel suit holds that the oil company played a key role in the chain of events leading up to the execution of the Ogoni activists.  “The allegations are that Shell, through its subsidiary, was in very close cooperation with the Abacha regime,” says Hoffman. “The end point of that was the execution of the Ogoni Nine.” LaHood alleges that Shell had actually paid the Nigerian military to go into parts of Ogoniland, and had called in the army to suppress protests against the oil industry. Shell was possibly even involved in bribing witnesses in the trial of the Ogoni Nine.

But there are still several ambiguities in the Kiobel case, and it’s unclear if the suit will be successful even if the Supreme Court decides that corporations can be sued under the ATS. To be held liable, Shell’s activity must qualify as “aiding and abetting” human rights abuses, according to the liability standard set in Presbyterian Church of Sudan v. Talisman Energy Inc., another landmark ATS decision. And the alleged actions of Shell and the Abacha government must meet the Sosa standard as a violation of customary international law. Currently, ATS cases are difficult to prosecute because even terms like “aiding and abetting” and “violation of customary international law” are subject to radically different interpretations.

As University of California law professor Chimène Keitner explains, the legislative branch could help clarify how and when the ATS should be used. “At some point, Congress should probably take up the question of tort liability for corporations aiding egregious misconduct overseas,” she says. But in such a polarized political environment, she doesn’t expect this to happen. “That’s the challenge of the Supreme Court more broadly in this political climate. On the one hand, they have to give guidance to parties in lawsuits, without on the other hand doing what Congress is supposed to do, which is figure out these difficult social tradeoffs.” With ATS cases, the courts are forced to negotiate such tradeoffs with only one sentence worth of legislative guidance.

The Supreme Court’s consideration of the Kiobel case will be one small part of this process. Keitner says that she expects a party-line vote when the case comes before the Supreme Court this February, although she says that some conservative justices, like those who sided with the plaintiffs in the controversial Citizens United case, might be swayed by the idea that corporations are “are private actors within the domestic legal system.” Says Keitner, “I’m not the first observer to note that there is some incongruity in saying that corporations have First Amendment rights but can’t be sued for violations of international law.”

SOURCE ARTICLE

A village in Nigeria’s oil-rich southern delta where observers found a drinking-water well polluted with benzene 900 times the international limit has sued Royal Dutch Shell PLC for $1 billion in a U.S. federal court.

Published October 21, 2011 | FoxNews.com

LAGOS, Nigeria– A village in Nigeria’s oil-rich southern delta where observers found a drinking-water well polluted with benzene 900 times the international limit has sued Royal Dutch Shell PLC for $1 billion in a U.S. federal court.

The lawsuit alleges that Shell, long the dominant oil company over Nigeria’s more than 50 years of production, acted willfully negligent in pursuing profits over protecting the nation’s Niger Delta.

The lawsuit filed by lawyers in Detroit uses a recent United Nations report over widespread pollution in the delta’s Ogoniland area for much of its evidence. However, that report implied Nigeria’s state-run oil company, rather than Shell, was responsible for recent damage in village of Ogale in Nigeria’s Rivers state.

“It is not isolated or accidental, but part of a culture and ongoing pattern of conduct that consistently and repeatedly ignored risks to others in favor of financial advantage,” the lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan reads.

Some environmentalists say as much as 550 million gallons of oil have poured into the Niger Delta during 50 years of production — at a rate roughly comparable to one Exxon Valdez disaster per year. Even today, oil laps up in brackish delta creeks in Ogoniland, creating a black ring around the coastlines.

Ogale was one of the first operational oil fields discovered in Nigeria, where the nation’s first shipment of 22,000 barrels of crude oil exported to Europe came from, the lawsuit said. In the time since, the village suffered from the pollution of oil exploration, putting villagers at risk, the suit said.

A U.N. report released in August highlighted the plight of the village, describing how investigators found about 3 inches of refined oil floating on the surface of groundwater that serves the community’s wells. It also described finding high levels of benzene, a known carcinogen, in the water.

Though Shell abandoned production in Ogoniland in 1993 following civil unrest, miles of aging pipelines and flow stations sit in the area. However, the U.N. report said that a pipeline abandoned in 2008 by the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. lies near Ogale and showed signs that a large amount of oil spilled from it.

Benjamin Whitfield Jr., a Detroit lawyer representing the village elders, did not return a call for comment Friday.

A spokeswoman for Shell in Nigeria declined to comment, saying the company does not discuss ongoing lawsuits.

Lawyers filed the U.S. lawsuit on behalf of the villagers in Nigeria using the 222-year-old Alien Tort Statute, a law increasingly used in recent years to sue corporations for alleged abuses abroad. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court said it will use a separate lawsuit between Nigerian villagers and Shell to decide whether corporations may be held liable in U.S. courts for alleged human rights abuses overseas under the law.

Shell has been sued in the past in the U.S. over its Nigerian operations. In June 2009, it agreed to a $15.5 million settlement to end a lawsuit alleging that the oil giant was complicit in the executions of activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and other civilians by Nigeria’s former military regime.

SOURCE ARTICLE

Movement for Survival of Ogoni People president Ledum Mitee says the court’s decision sends a message that Shell must be held to account

James Butty

THOMSON REUTERS

Alison Frankel

10/17/2011

Almost as soon as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit concluded last year in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum that corporations are not liable in U.S. courts under the Alien Tort Statute for abetting overseas atrocities, the ruling looked like U.S. Supreme Court bait. As I’ve reported, the D.C. Circuit, the Eleventh Circuit, and the Seventh Circuit have all come to the opposite conclusion about corporate liability under the ATS. The only question was which ATS case the high court would choose as the vehicle for deciding whether corporations can be sued for helping foreign governments violate international human-rights law.

We got the answer Monday: The Court granted the petition for a writ of certiorari by the Nigerian plaintiffs in Kiobel, who accused Shell of working with the Nigerian government in a deadly military crackdown on protests against oil exploration. That’s great news for Paul Hoffman of Schonbrun DeSimone Seplow Harris Hoffman & Harrison, who has been the lead appellate counsel for Alien Tort plaintiffs in cases across the federal circuits. “I’m pretty happy about it,” Hoffman told me Monday. On the losing side of the Supreme Court’s cert grant is Rowan Wilson of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, who had asked the Justices to let stand the Second Circuit’s exoneration of Shell. Wilson declined my request for comment.

But there’s more to Monday’s grant than meets the eye. The Court said it would hear Kiobel in connection with a case called Mohamad v. Rajoub, which involves the Torture Victims Prevention Act. Although both the cases pose the question of whether defendants other than individuals (Shell in the Kiobel case; the Palestinian Authority in the Mohamad case) are responsible in U.S. courts for overseas atrocities, there are also some significant differences. The ATS, which dates all the way back to 1789, has a murky legislative history and was almost never invoked until the 1980s, when it became fashionable to use it to claim violations of international law. The TVPA, on the other hand, was passed in 1991 to protect U.S. citizens in an age of global terrorism.

The two laws are often invoked together in cases involving claims of atrocities against both U.S. and foreign victims. And unlike most courts ruling on corporate liability under the ATS, according to Hoffman, judges have, in the main, found corporations are not liable under the TVPA. But Hoffman, who told me he was involved in drafting the Torture Victims law, said that Congress explicitly left intact the scope of the Alien Tort Statute in drafting the newer law. Robert Tolchin of the Berkman Law Office, who represents the victim in the Torture Victim case the Court has accepted, said the TVPA was supposed to extend to U.S. citizens the rights non-U.S. citizens have under the Alien Tort Statute, so it never made sense to absolve corporations (or in his case the Palestinian Authority) from liability under either law.

Hoffman is nevertheless expecting Shell to argue that the same strictures courts have found to apply to corporate liability under the Torture Victims law should also apply to the ATS. Hoffman said he’s ready for that argument: “The D.C. Circuit rejected it. Almost everywhere it’s been considered, it’s been rejected.” For his part, Tolchin told me he’ll argue that Congress never intended to limit the TVPA to individual defendants.

Hoffman said the Supreme Court made a wise decision to take both cases at the same time, to clarify the corporate scope of both laws once and for all. “I feel pretty strongly that Kiobel is just completely off base,” he said. “But the good thing is that we’ll know by June whether Kiobel is an outlier or whether there’s something there [for defendants].”

I left a message with Laura Ferguson of Miller & Chevalier, who represents the defendants in the Mohamad case, but didn’t hear back.

(Reporting by Alison Frankel)

Follow us on Twitter: @ReutersLegal

(Adds comment by Robert Tolchin)

SOURCE ARTICLE

17 October 2011

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.”

The Kiobel versus Royal Dutch Petroleum case will be heard by the high court alongside a new torture case, Mohamad versus Rajoun, which involves the family of an American who died in 1995 from torture injuries inflicted by Palestinian Authority officers.

A US appeals court in New York ruled in both cases that corporations or political organizations were immune to such liability.

The Supreme Court’s 2011-2012 term began this month, and the nine justices are expected to issue their decision on the cases by the end of the session next June or July.

The Kiobel case was part of a broader set of legal complaints by Nigeria’s Ogoni people, who argued that Royal Dutch Shell was complicit in murder, torture and other abuses committed by the country’s former military government.

The victims included Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and others executed in 1995 in what plaintiffs said was a campaign of repression backed by the oil giant.

Saro-Wiwa had led a non-violent campaign to protest environmental destruction and abuses against the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta before he was hanged along with other activists after his trial in a military court.

In 2009 Shell agreed to pay out $15.5 million to relatives of the victims, in what it hoped would be the end of a long legal battle and avoidance of a potentially embarrassing court case.

Shell maintained its innocence throughout, saying the settlement was a “humanitarian gesture” to help the Ogoni, but human rights lawyers in New York two years ago hailed the agreement as a precedent for holding Shell and other oil giants responsible for activities in countries with repressive governments.

That case did not mark the end of Shell’s legal troubles. Esther Kiobel, wife of Ogoni activist Barinem Kiobel, who was executed along with Saro-Wiwa, did not participate in the settlement and pressed on with her suit.

Shell’s lawyers argued that the case is “a poor vehicle” for address human rights issues.

“The essence of Kiobel’s complaint is that Dutch and English holding companies should have to answer in a US court for acts committed in Nigeria by the Nigerian government, allegedly with assistance from their indirect Nigerian subsidiary,” the company said in its brief.

SOURCE