World Power

Culture

Lawsuits Target Energy Giants: The Bigger Picture

By Newsdesk.org Staff | May 13, 2002

By Jennifer Huang | World Power I: Business & Law

Page 6 of 11

The ExxonMobil case is the latest in a growing number of lawsuits filed against transnational energy corporations in U.S. courts alleging complicity in human rights abuses abroad. The filings reflect the complicated business of oil drilling and profit-making in countries where corrupt governments, brutal military forces and ethnic and economic tensions are often caught in an ongoing cycle of violence. Inevitably, it is poor, rural communities — like the plaintiffs in these cases — who say they suffer the most injury from military crackdowns and environmental destruction. Active cases around the world include:

Doe v. Unocal and Roe v. Unocal, alleging forced labor, torture and wrongful death during the building of the Yadana natural gas pipeline through Burma;
Aguinda v. Texaco and Jota v. Texaco, accusing the oil company of improper handling and dumping of toxic waste leading to large-scale environmental destruction in the Oriente region of Ecuador and neighboring Peru;
Wiwa v. Shell and Wiwa v. Anderson, asserting Royal Dutch Shell’s complicity in the wrongful death of activist Ken Saro-Wiwa;
Bowoto v. Chevron, charging that Chevron (Now ChevronTexaco) was involved in the massacre of Nigerian protesters on an oil platform. The suits have come to the United States under the Alien Tort Claims Act, a law that gives U.S. courts jurisdiction over tort cases “committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States,” if the defendant has a presence in the U.S.

On the books since 1789, the little-used act originally took aim at piracy, but was dusted off in 1979 in New York by the Center for Constitutional Rights in Filartiga v. Pena-Irala.

Culture

Lawsuits Target Energy Giants: The Problem — Violence

By Newsdesk.org Staff | May 13, 2002

By Jennifer Huang | World Power I: Business & Law

Page 4 of 11

Indonesia — an archipelago nation assembled in the wake of Dutch and British colonial rule — has never dealt kindly with independence movements. Its military invasion and occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999, for example, took the lives of at least 200,000 there. In 1989 Jakarta designated Aceh as a military operations zone — daerah operasi militer, or DOM — initiating a 10-year period of martial law in which thousands of people were killed or disappeared. “So many people were affected that, today, virtually every Acehnese in the hardest-hit areas can cite a family member who was the direct target of a human rights violation — and who had no link to GAM at the time,” Human Rights Watch reported in August 2001. Although DOM was repealed in 1999, violence continues unabated.