Photo Courtesy of Flickr
By Siona Ahuja ’24
Staff Writer
Editor’s note: the opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Mount Holyoke News.
“Contempt of court” took on a whole new meaning for a human rights lawyer who led a three-decade-long fight against the gas giant Chevron. Former attorney Steven Donziger shed light on the company’s control of the American courts, but ended up being disbarred, being subjected to more than 800 days of pretrial house arrest and serving a sentence of six months of federal prison time, which began on Oct. 27.
Donziger was the lead attorney representing 30,000 plaintiffs in a legal battle against Chevron (then called Texaco) for dumping excessive amounts of oil onto Indigenous land and water in Ecuador from the 1970s to the 1990s. According to the Yale MacMillan Center, the spill led to an epidemic of cancer and other related health problems to the extent that it was dubbed the “Amazon Chernobyl.” To avoid a jury trial, Chevron convinced the legal parties involved to move the case to Ecuadorian courts, where the judge ruled in favor of Donziger. By 2011, the corporation owed the Indigenous people of Ecuador an historic $9.5 billion in reparations, according to a Reuters article.
For Donziger, this victory was short-lived, for he soon became the victim of a smear campaign and was countersued by the company.
In an interview for Jacobin Magazine, Donziger commented that Chevron was “using sixty law firms and two thousand lawyers” to discredit him. The company went as far as creating a web-publication, The Amazon Post, with slogans that would be better suited to a middle school student government poster that seem to portray Donziger as a fraudulent moneymaker such as ‘Confessions of a Fraud’ and ‘Chevron Foe Surrenders.’”
The fabricated evidence of Donziger’s involvement in racketeering, extortion, wire fraud and witness tampering came from a corrupt Ecuadorian judge, Alberto Guerra, who in 2015 admitted to changing his story multiple times, according to an article in The Intercept. The Southern District of New York court pronounced Donziger guilty of fraud, and his refusal to present his computer and phone for inspection put him at risk of a criminal contempt charge. He was sentenced to an indefinite period of house arrest, making Donziger the “only lawyer in the U.S. ever held in confinement, pretrial, on a contempt charge,” according to a Law360 editorial. Halting Donziger’s career and confining him for an extended period of time is a violation of his human rights. A Reuters article showed that five international jurists concluded Donziger’s house arrest to be a gross violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
What may have seemed a win for the Ecuadorians quickly dissolved when Chevron failed to comply with the ruling and, in a 2007 press release, threatened the victims with a “lifetime of appellate and collateral litigation.” To not even pay a dollar to the Indigenous peoples of Ecuador is an egregious violation of human decency and an obvious evasion of the law. When you are a multi-billion-dollar corporation whose pockets run so deep that it can overturn every international legal case that comes in its way, the law translates into a matter of convenience.
The biases of the judges and prosecutors involved against Donziger come from their personal ties to Chevron. An Activist Post article reported that Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Southern District of New York had investment holdings in Chevron, and failed to disclose this before steering the case in the corporation’s favor. Moreover, he handpicked private prosecutors from Seward & Kissel LLP to represent the United States government. This law firm had directly represented Chevron in a litigation as recently as 2018. “It’s basically Judge Kaplan who’s my judge, jury and prosecutor. That’s never happened before, and it’s very dangerous and violates the rule of law. No country does it that way,” Donziger said in an interview with Jacobin Magazine in May 2021.
U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska further sentenced Donziger to a maximum of six months in prison. According to Jacobin Magazine, she has historically made “dubious rulings” in favor of companies like S&P Global and Coca-Cola, and has served on the board of the Federalist Society — a pro-corporate entity to which Chevron is a major donor. Jacobin reported that Preska also exploited the pandemic-induced Zoom trials by prohibiting public access and scrutiny to the Donziger trial.
Chevron has managed to seep into the judicial framework and overturn a fair ruling to avoid paying damages. But the case of Ecuador is only the most publicized story of Chevron’s misdeeds. According to a new report published by environmental anthropologist Dr. Nan Greer, Chevron has 70 outstanding cases in 31 countries, with 13 of them being in the U.S. alone.
On the day of Donziger’s commitment to a federal prison in Connecticut, Greer, aided by individuals from Greenpeace and Amazon Watch among others, published a 100-page independent report that underlined the environmental degradation caused by Chevron globally, especially in Indigenous lands. Titled “Chevron’s Global Destruction: Ecocide, Genocide and Corruption,” the report revealed Chevron’s pending dues in the countries it has plundered for oil. Only 0.006 percent of the fines, $286 million, have been paid, while $50.5 billion is pending. Moreover, Chevron filed legal charges against “virtually every claim made against it for crimes of pollution, corruption, tax evasion and human rights violations.”
“[The report] says horrible things about large companies, multinational companies,” Greer said in an interview for Mongabay. “It says that they can completely walk around international laws, national laws, the laws of their domicile.”
Donziger’s legal battle is a testament to the steady corporatization of American legal institutions, and the worldwide corruption that ensues from it. There is a dearth of whistleblowers and human rights advocates who have the ability to shake Big Oil from its imperialistic bedrock and expose them to the masses. However, while the one percent is in control of the courts, environmental martyrs like Donziger will remain exactly that — martyrs — and not heroes.