A global coalition of NGOs, human rights monitors, academics and analysts have joined Platform in sending a letter to the Board members of Royal Dutch Shell and Shell Nigeria which holds Shell to account for its role in recent human rights abuses in Nigeria. Below is a short extract from the letter:

Today the US Supreme Court hears Kiobel v Shell, a case that alleges Shell aided and abetted human rights violations and crimes against humanity committed by the Nigerian military against the Ogoni people from 1992 onwards. Twenty years later, Shell’s operations in the Niger Delta continue to be linked to human rights violations committed by government forces and other armed groups, as well as result in extensive environmental devastation.

As the Nigerian government increases military spending and deploys more forces in the Delta and across Nigeria, there are clear risks that Shell will repeat the same mistakes, become complicit in human rights violations and fail to resolve some of the underlying issues of ongoing repression and pollution.

A recent report by Platform recommends that Shell and other stakeholders address the root causes of conflict by cleaning up pollution, de-militarising the Delta and providing adequate remedies to the individuals and communities affected. In this letter, we, the undersigned, hold Shell accountable for its conduct and its inaction on these issues; challenge Shell’s stated commitments to human rights and “high ethical standards” and emphasise the need for urgent action.

The letter is available to download or read below.

Three of the world’s biggest private oil companies face landmark legal actions this February. Here is a brief run down of the main cases, what they are about and why they matter.

1. US v BP

At the centre of the legal fallout from BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in April 2010 is a  complex civil trial which begins on 27 February. The trial will determine who is to blame, how much should be paid in damages and penalties and who should pay them. BP is one of a number of defendants, alongside Transocean (owner and operator of the rig) and Halliburton. There are over 120,000 claimants involved, from Gulf Coast fishers to the US government, and a massive 72 million pages of documents. The trial, heard before a Judge Carl Barbier without a jury, is expected to last all year.The future of the UK oil company could yet unravel in the legal vortex surrounding the Gulf of Mexico spill, with still more cases being added to this sizeable civil claim. According to the Guardian, charges of gross negligence over the accident, which claimed the lives of 11 workers, have not been ruled out. On 14 February, BP lost a separate case brought by share holders on the New York Stock Exchange. A District Court in Houston found that BP must face charges of fraud for misrepresenting its ability to address a major oil spill.

2. Kiobel v Shell

Filed in 2002, this case charges Shell with complicity in human rights abuses and crimes against humanity in the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta between 1992 and 1995. Shell is accused of aiding and abetting the Nigerian military to commit violations a widespread and systematic campaign of torture, extra-judicial executions, prolonged arbitrary detention, and indiscriminate killings constituting crimes against humanity. Dr. Barinem Kiobel was among the 9 Ogoni activists executed by the Nigerian military regime on 10 November 1995, with the alleged collaboration of Shell. Esther Kiobel, Dr. Barinem’s widow, is one of the claimants. For more details and documents visit the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Wiwa v Shell an earlier lawsuit founded on the same allegations was settled out of court in June 2009 for $15.5 million (see the videos below).

On 28 February, the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over whether or not corporations can be held liable in the US for complicity in human rights abuses committed overseas. The Supreme Court’s decision will have major implications for corporate accountability. If successful, corporations will continue to face liability under the Alien Torts Statute in the US. But Kiobel would still have to be re-heard before any judgement on liability is made.

Complicity has continued to be a problem for Shell in Nigeria. Shell’s involvement in recent human rights abuses in the Niger Delta was revealed in Platform’s 2011 report, Counting the Cost.

3. Brazil v Chevron:

Brazillian prosecutors have filed a case for civil damages against Chevron and subcontractor Transocean over pollution offshore. On 7 November 2011, Chevron spilled an estimated 3,000 barrels of oil 230 miles off the coast of Rio de Janeiro after Transocean’s drilling work caused cracks in the sea floor. Chevron executives could face criminal charges and penalties of up to $11.6 billion.

It’s uncertain when the case may start, but the short term impacts have already proved significant. The Brazillian regulator, ANP, has suspended Chevron’s licence at the site of the spill at Frade field, causing a 15% decline in the company’s rate of oil extraction. The case against Chevron could establish important environmental restrictions for deepwater drillers seeking to exploit Brazil’s emerging oil and gas boom.

Royal Dutch Shell has been sued so many times over its conduct in Nigeria that its cases offer a laboratory experiment for human rights litigation.

After thirteen years of arduous U.S. alien tort litigation, Wiwa v. Shell resulted in a piddling $15.5 million settlement in 2009. Kiobel v. Shell has done even worse. Nearly a decade after the case was filed, it has succeeded only in abolishing the corporate alien tort within the Second Circuit, and if the U.S. Supreme Court accepts cert, it may do the same nationwide.

Now comes the “Bodo” case, which emerged from obscurity three weeks ago. On August 3, four months after farmers and fishermen from the village of Bodo filed a common law complaint in London high court, Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary admitted liability for a pair of oil spills in return for the parent company’s dismissal from the suit. The Financial Times trumpeted the potential for a payout of over $400 million, although the Shell Petroleum Development Company called this number “massively in excess of the true position.”

As Goldhaber makes clear, the Bodo case is far from over.

the Bodo deal was not a one-sided plaintiffs victory. Corporate formalities matter intensely to both Shell and its human rights critics. As Dutch plaintiffs lawyer Liesbeth Zevgeld has put it, “Shell headquarters believes it is untouchable, but we believe it is legally responsible for damage caused in Nigeria.”  More generally, parental liability for the conduct of foreign subsidiaries has been called the leading legal question in European business human rights. With Royal Dutch’s dismissal from the Bodo suit, that battle shifts to the impending Dutch trial of Oguru v. Shell, which seeks the cleanup of three oil spills elsewhere in the Niger delta. The stakes may be somewhat lower in the Netherlands, because Dutch courts lack the sort of class action rules that let U.K. lawyers aggregate 69,000 villagers’ claims for loss of livelihood.

Read the full article here.

Ofehe was arrested on 22 February 2011, originally on “suspicion of people smuggling and forgery” and has been in detention since then. The Dutch authorities later altered the charges and accused Ofehe of plotting to blow up Shell pipelines in the oil-rich Niger Delta. His arrest follows what appears to be an elaborate year-long surveillance operation during which

his phones and computers were allegedly tapped and a camera placed in front of his office for three weeks.

Friends of the Earth Nigeria have raised concerns about the process of Ofehe’s arrest and the charges against him. A Dutch media channel reported:

Ofehe’s lawyers are sceptical about the motives in the case against their client. They are convinced that the Dutch authorities are complicit in a campaign to silence a vocal critic of the multinational oil companies and alleged misappropriation of oil revenues by the Nigerian government. “There’s something funny going on, that’s all I can say for now,” says Ed Manders.

Ofehe has played a central role in recent campaigning against the oil giant in Holland. In January 2011, Ofehe took Dutch parliamentarians on a tour of the Niger Delta on 26 January he appeared to give testimony before the Dutch Parliament’s inquiry into Shell’s environmental and social impact in Nigeria.

PLATFORM is concerned that the timing of Ofehe’s arrest and the charges against him could be politically motivated, and we urge the Dutch authorities to guarantee due process and a fair hearing. Follow the live blog at Radio Netherlands Worldwide here.

In an op ed in the Nigerian news site 234NEXT, Nnimmo Bassey the executive director of Friends of the Earth International, highlights the massive oil spills in Bodo, Ogoni that UNEP’s two year study entirely ignored.

In a critique of the UNEP report, Richard Steiner of Oasis Earth organisation, Alaska, writes: “The UNEP report devotes several pages (161-166) specifically to artisanal refining at the Bodo West oilfield, and correctly reports an unfortunate increase in such between 2007 and 2011. However, in this analysis of oil pollution in this region, UNEP entirely ignores the other much larger source of oil spilled into this same region in that same time period – the twin ruptures of the Trans Niger Pipeline (TNP) caused by SPDC negligence in 2008 and 2009. Together these spills contributed between 250,000 – 350,000 barrels of oil into this system, orders of magnitude more than illegal refining. Much of the oil at Bodo West area likely derived from the TNP Bodo spills.” How do these compare to the volume of spills from artisanal refineries?

Professor Steiner also wonders why the UNEP study report says that “no single clear and continuous source of spilled oil was observed or reported during UNEP’s site visits,” whereas the massive spills at Bodo occurred at the time of the study and the combined spill volume may well exceed that of the Exxon Valdez that occurred in Alaska in 1989.

A similar point was made by The Guardian‘s environment correspondent, John Vidal, who questioned UNEP over why their study made no reference to Shell’s major oil spillage in Goi. Farmers from Goi community in Ogoni are among those suing Shell in The Hague for compensation since 2008. Their heartbreaking story was retold in The Guardian on Saturday.

A quiet fishing community of fewer than 100 people, Goi was steadily weakened and then broken by a series of oil spills that, over 20 years, made the network of swamps, lagoons, rivers and creeks around it unusable.

“People used to drink the water in the creek, fish, cook and swim in it. It was a perfect place,” says Dooh. “We wanted for nothing, but the spills came, the tide washed in pollution from elsewhere and in 1987 a massive oil fire burned uncontrolled for weeks. By 2008, most people had left.”

Dooh and the last people of Goi then finally gave up. “We kept being polluted. We could not stay any longer,” says his eldest son, Eric. “Shell said they would fix things, but a contractor came and scooped some of the oil up and that was it. The spills just got bigger and bigger.” In 2009, a third large spill made the last house uninhabitable.

A coalition of 10 local environmental groups in the Niger Delta also released a statement yesterday which challenged UNEP’s “comprehensive” consultation in Ogoni. Organisations in the National Coalition on Gas Flaring and Oil Spills in the Niger Delta (NACGOND) were consulted by UNEP, despite their extensive local knowledge of Ogoni.

The contents of [UNEP's] report suggest that there was a wide-ranging pre-operational consultation with key stakeholders. We are surprised by this, because not many civil society organizations in our coalition can claim to have been consulted; nor are there many communities in our networks that claim to have supplied information during UNEP’s investigations. If we, who are on the ground in the Niger Delta, did not participate in a transparent process of determining the causes of the incessant oil spills, we wonder who the key stakeholders are that were consulted, and supplied this information.

See more here: NACGOND PRESS RELEASE On UNEP (2)

Taken together, the [UNEP] report and admission of responsibility by Shell are powerful reminders of the crippling effect the oil industry continues to have on the Delta’s economy and environment, particularly on local communities that rely on the land and water for their survival.

The impoverished people from these Delta communities have borne the brunt of devastating, toxic pollution since drilling began there in the 1950s. Many Ogoni have never lived without contaminated soil and water, and although Shell stopped producing oil from Ogoni as a result of popular opposition in 1993, they still pump oil across Ogoniland through the Trans-Niger pipeline.

Other suits have been brought against Shell and its Nigerian subsidiary SPDC in Nigeria, the Netherlands, and the United States for environmental harms and human rights abuses related to the company’s oil operations in the Niger Delta. These claims have covered issues ranging from continued gas flaring (a leading emitter of greenhouse gases that contributes to acid rain and a practice that is illegal under Nigerian law), to the destruction of the delicate ecology of the Delta, to complicity in murder, torture and other serious harms. ERI was involved in a case in U.S. federal court over Shell’s complicity in the killings, torture and severe abuses committed by the Nigerian military against individual Ogoni in the early 1990s. That case was only settled in 2009 when Shell agreed to pay $15.5 million, which allowed for the creation of a trust for the Ogoni people and compensation for the victims in the case and their surviving relatives.

For more background on the Wiwa v Shell case, check out this report by Al-Jazeera, New York.

Shell has admitted liability but has a long way to go to make amends

Oil spills destroyed my village in Nigeria and decades of environmental and social injustice are still to be addressed.

By Patrick Naagbanton

Shell’s admission of liability for two massive oil spills in 2008-09 in my village of Bodo in the Niger Delta is a step forward in the long struggle for corporate accountability. An impoverished village that yesterday lay in ruins has today felt a welcome glimmer of hope and justice.

We are happy with the news that Shell could be forced to clean up the environmental devastation it has caused and to pay more than $400m in compensation. But our jubilation is overshadowed by more than five decades of environmental and social injustice yet to be addressed.

Bodo village is a fishing community in the minority Ogoni region of the Niger Delta. Shell was forced out of Ogoni in 1993, following mass protests led by writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed on 10 November 1995 alongside eight other campaigners. Shell’s vast network of oil wells, pipelines, flow-stations and gas flares remained in Ogoni and are an everyday reminder of what we have suffered.

Many of Shell’s rusty, leaky pipelines date back to the 1970s and have been poorly maintained ever since (see pages 31-36 and 43 of Friends of the Earth Netherlands report). It was equipment failure that caused Shell’s high-pressure Trans-Niger pipeline to rupture on 28 August 2008, gushing an estimated 2,000 barrels of oil per day into Bodo for weeks. The land and water was covered in thick layers of crude. Shell was also responsible for a second spill from the same pipeline on 2 February 2009.

Oil spills have effectively destroyed my community. Local farmers and fishers were forced to abandon their traditional ways of life. Bodo Creek is, ecologically speaking, dead. The fish that were not killed by the heavy pollution now reek of petroleum and cannot sustain a village population of 69,000 people. Shell has violated our basic human rights to food, water and livelihood. The compensation Shell offered us – £3,500 plus bags of rice and sugar – was insulting and wholly inadequate.

Oil spills are a daily occurrence in the Niger Delta. According to United Nations Development Programme, more than 6,800 spills were recorded between 1976 and 2001, but many more have gone unreported (see page 21 of UNDP report). Independent estimates put the total volume of oil spilled in the Delta over the last 50 years at 9m to 13m barrels, twice that of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster. This estimate does not include the wider forms of oil pollution for which there is no data.

I helped the Bodo community file a case against Shell in the high court in London because it is easy for Shell to abuse the judicial system in Nigeria. The oil giant spent decades fighting lengthy appeals that bled the victims dry in legal costs. Shell is appealing against a 2006 order to pay $1.5bn in damages to the Ijaw communities of Bayelsa State. Since 2005, Shell has refused to comply with a court order to end gas flaring in the Iwherekan community. The The Ejama Ebubu community has waited more than 40 years for Shell to clean an oil spill from 1970. Life expectancy in the Delta is around 43 years (see page 24 of UNDP report). Rural communities impacted by pollution in the Niger Delta are routinely denied access to justice.

Taking the Bodo case to London, the seat of Shell’s global headquarters and a European oil capital, was a last resort. On this occasion, it has proved harder for Shell to evade responsibility. Our hope is that this case will force Shell to compensate more victims in a timely and adequate manner and to clean up its widespread pollution in the Delta. We note with dismay that Shell is refusing to compensate victims in alegal case brought by Nigerian farmers and Friends of the Earth in The Hague.

Across the Delta, we still face a number of challenges. Shell and the Nigerian authorities must take immediately action to clean up and remediate more than 2,000 oil spill sites (see page 16 of Friends of the Earth Netherlands report). Every day that Shell delays clean up, the ecological damage worsens. Oil is spreading across the creeks and mangrove forests and seeping deeper into the water table. The cumulative impact on the environment will take decades to remedy. A new UNEP report is expected to confirm the depths of the environmental damage the Ogoni region.

Nigerian laws must also change. Currently, victims of oil spills have highly limited statutory rights to compensation. A single payment of $7,000 (see page 52 of Amnesty report) can discharge oil companies from having to clean up oil spills no matter how big. Such token fines must be replaced with meaningful penalties that are stringently enforced. Companies like Shell cannot be allowed to exploit lax regulations abroad, and no company should be above the law.

How long will Bodo village have to wait before it will be restored by Shell? Ejama-Ebubu is still waiting more than 40 years on. In cases like Oruma, Shell’s clean up efforts have done more harm than good. Shell has scooped and dumped the oil inside pits and set them ablaze, incinerating local farmland. The past 50 years shows us that Shell will only take action under intense public pressure from investors, governments, and the international community. We won’t be holding our breath.

Here is a round-up of press coverage so far. Current estimates suggest that Shell could pay our over $410 million (£250m) in compensation.

FT: Shell’s Nigeria pay-out could top £250m

BBC: Ogoniland oil spills: Shell admits Nigeria liability

Reuters: Shell faces first Nigerian oil spill claims in UK

Niger Delta spills: Shell liable

The Guardian: Shell oil spills in the Niger delta: ‘Nowhere and no one has escaped’

RTT: Shell Accepts Liability For Two Oil Spills In Nigeria

Fox: Shell’s SPDC JV To Begin Settlement Talks Following Nigeria Spill

Shell accepts blame for Nigeria oil spills

Africasia: Shell admits ‘devastating’ Nigeria oil spills

Nigeria ‘sabotage’ forces Shell shut-in

Morning Star: Oil giant Shell admits liability for Nigeria spills

RNW: Shell responsible for Nigeria leaks

CTV: Shell’s Nigeria payout could top $400-million

AFP: Shell admits ‘devastating’ Nigeria oil spills

Shell faces a bill of hundreds of millions of dollars after accepting full liability for two massive oil spills that devastated a Nigerian community of 69,000 people and may take at least 20 years to clean up. Experts who studied video footage of the spills at Bodo in Ogoniland say they could together be as large as the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, when 10m gallons of oil destroyed the remote coastline. Until now, Shell has claimed that less than 40,000 gallons were spilt inNigeria. Papers seen by the Guardian show that following a class action suit in London over the past four months, the company has accepted responsibility for the 2008 double rupture of the Bodo-Bonny trans-Niger pipeline that pumps 120,000 barrels of oil a day though the community.

Shell’s admission of liability could open the floodgates for further lawsuits in the UK over the company’s daily oil spills in the Niger Delta region. Local human rights groups welcomed the outcome.

“The news that Shell has accepted liability in Britain will be greeted with joy in the delta. The British courts may now be inundated with legitimate complaints,” said Patrick Naagbanton, coordinator for the Centre of Environment and Human Rights in Port Harcourt.

Expect further bad news for Shell this week, as the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) is due to release its report on the full extent of the damage caused by oil spills in Ogoni.

Later this week the company will be heavily implicated by the UN for the environmental disaster in the Niger delta which has seen more than 7,000 oil spills in the low lying swamps and farmland since 1989. Shell first discovered oil in the Niger delta in 1956. According to Amnesty International, more than 13m barrels of oil have been spilt in the delta, twice as much as by BP in last year’s Gulf of Mexico spill. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report, funded by Shell, will be presented to president Goodluck Jonathan on Thursday and is expected to be released on Friday in London. UNEP’s report, the first peer-reviewed scientific study of more than 60 spills, is expected to say that oil pollution in Ogoniland is much worse than previously believed, having sunk deep into the water table. Many spills have not been cleared up since 1970 and the effects on the local economy, health and development have been severe. The report will not apportion blame for individual spills.