{"id":183205,"date":"2021-04-19T12:00:08","date_gmt":"2021-04-19T11:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=183205"},"modified":"2025-01-10T15:06:17","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T15:06:17","slug":"the-kafkaesque-nightmare-of-attorney-steven-donziger-a-literal-prisoner-of-the-chevron-corporation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/04\/the-kafkaesque-nightmare-of-attorney-steven-donziger-a-literal-prisoner-of-the-chevron-corporation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Kafkaesque Nightmare of Attorney Steven Donziger, a Literal Prisoner of the Chevron Corporation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When human rights lawyer Steven Donziger won a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the oil giant Chevron, the company retaliated by setting out to destroy Donziger\u2019s life. Now in his twentieth month of house arrest on the orders of a Chevron-linked judge, his Kafkaesque story is a window into the corrupt and corporate-captured US legal system.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Attorney Steven Donziger speaks during a press conference in Quito, Ecuador, 2014.
(Rodrigo Buendia \/ AFP via Getty Images)<\/p><\/div>\n

15 Apr 2021 – <\/em>Human rights lawyer Steven Donziger can rightly be called America\u2019s first corporate political prisoner. Currently living through his twentieth month under house arrest, Donziger was part of a legal team that in 2011 won a historic, multibillion dollar lawsuit against oil giant Chevron over its activities in the Ecuadorian Amazon.<\/p>\n

Donziger, however, was afforded little time to savor this victory \u2014 soon finding himself on the receiving end of an unprecedented smear campaign and legal offensive undertaken by the company, which has ultimately seen him languish in house arrest in his New York City home for over six hundred days without a trial. This state of affairs comes after an extremely dubious ruling by a judge with tobacco-industry ties<\/a> who has repeatedly praised<\/a> Chevron.Donziger\u2019s case has attracted support from around the world, with some<\/a> fifty-five Nobel Laureates, hundreds of attorneys and legal organizations, and celebrities including<\/a> Sting, Danny Glover, and Roger Waters condemning the corporate campaign against him. On May 10, he\u2019ll be facing a misdemeanor contempt charge in a New York City court, the trial overseen by a judge who belongs to the Federalist Society \u2014 a right-wing group that quite literally counts Chevron<\/a> among its donors.Jacobin<\/em> spoke with Donziger about his work exposing Chevron\u2019s crimes against the people of Ecuador, his case, and the dangerous precedent it sets in allowing corporations to persecute, and prosecute, their critics.<\/p>\n

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LS: <\/abbr>All of this began because you were part of a legal team that took action \u2014 successfully, I might add \u2014 against Chevron over its activities in Ecuador. Can you tell us about that lawsuit?<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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SD: <\/abbr><\/strong>I got involved in the case in April of 1993 when I was invited to join a delegation of lawyers and scientists to investigate what we had been told was maybe the world\u2019s worst oil-related catastrophe in an area of the Ecuadorian Amazon \u2014 just south of the Columbia border.<\/div>\n
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So we went there and I discovered what was really an apocalyptic scene: huge, Olympic-size pools of oil that had been left in the jungle; hundreds and hundreds of these open air, toxic waste pits that Chevron had built to dispose of waste. They would put pipes into the sides of these pits so they could easily run the cancer-causing contents into nearby rivers and streams that the local indigenous peoples and other rural farming communities relied on for their drinking water and for bathing and fishing.<\/p>\n

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Oil pollution in the province of Sucumb\u00edos, Ecuador. (Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It was very clear that this was deliberately designed to lower production costs by polluting. So the catastrophe that we witnessed was really disturbing on a number of levels, but I think the thing that maybe most disturbed me was that it was designed<\/i> to do this. It wasn\u2019t an accident. Over time, experts began to call this the Amazon Chernobyl, and I think that by any objective metric it\u2019s probably the worst oil-related contamination on earth. Chevron owns it. They\u2019re refusing to take responsibility for it, and they\u2019re refusing to pay the people they harmed compensation for the damage, even though that has been ordered by multiple courts.<\/p>\n

So I got involved in 1993 and then became part of a team that pursued a legal case which culminated in a successful outcome for the people of Ecuador in 2011, when the Ecuadorian court ruled that Chevron was liable and owed $9.5 billion US dollars to the affected communities for cleanup. They have not paid a dollar and have since been pursuing an attack strategy against me and other lawyers, designed to help them evade complying with the law.<\/p>\n

Rather than pay the judgment of the Ecuadorian court, which has been affirmed on appeal by multiple appellate courts, including the Supreme courts of Ecuador and Canada, Chevron has just flat out refused to comply with the law. Chevron executives have told the indigenous peoples of Ecuador that, and they\u2019ve threatened them with what they call a lifetime of litigation unless they drop the case. They have threatened me with a demonization strategy in various lawsuits that have crippled me financially and have led to the removal of my law license without a hearing based on false evidence put forth by a paid Chevron witness.<\/p>\n

So, ultimately, in my view, there\u2019s a scheme led by Chevron and its law firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, supported by Judge Kaplan to weaponize the law in the United States to undermine the judgment of the Ecuadorian court that held Chevron liable. And they\u2019re doing that by trying to destroy and target me, and try to criminalize my work. They\u2019re doing that through the US justice system in a way that I believe is an egregious violation of human rights and basic decency.<\/p>\n

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