Steven Donziger

Steven Donziger is an American attorney known for his legal battles with Chevron, particularly the Lago Agrio oil field case which led the company to withdraw its operations from Ecuador. Donziger is currently under house arrest awaiting trial on charges of contempt of court in relation to the case, a move condemned by twenty-nine Nobel laureates as "judicial harassment" by Chevron.

Steven R. Donziger
Born1961
Jacksonville, Florida
OccupationLawyer
NationalityAmerican
EducationHarvard Law School

Early life and education

Donziger's mother raised him in Jacksonville, Florida, where she took him to picket in support of Cesar Chavez's lettuce boycott. While Donziger was a child, his grandfather was a Brooklyn district attorney and judge. Donziger attended Harvard Law School, where he played basketball with Barack Obama. He visited Ecuador in 1993, two years after completing law school, where he says he saw "what honestly looked like an apocalyptic disaster," including children walking barefoot down oil-covered roads and jungle lakes filled with oil.[1]

See also: Lago Agrio oil field § Litigation

After his visit to Ecuador, Donziger began working with inhabitants of the Amazonian village Lago Agrio on a class-action lawsuit.[1] In 2009, Donziger became lead organizer of 30,000 indigenous peoples in Ecuador in a class action lawsuit against Chevron over the company's activities in the Lago Agrio oil field.[1] Chevron was ordered to pay $18 billion in 2011 as a result of the contamination of indigenous land for oil extraction activities. Following the conclusion of the case, Chevron appealed the ruling,[1] leading to a reduction in the fine to $9.5 billion; no money has been awarded, pending further appeals.[2]

Kaplan's 2014 ruling on the Chevron case

Chevron filed a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) suit against Donziger.[3][2] U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan provided his ruling on the case in 2014, in which Kaplan ruled that the case in Ecuador was invalid because Donziger had achieved the case result through various offenses against legal ethics, including "egregious fraud" and racketeering.[2][3] A Wall Street Journal opinion column notes that a panel at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the United States upheld this ruling in 2016, and that appeals courts in Argentina and Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice rejected Donziger's petitions.[3] The case relied in large part on the testimony of Alberto Guerra, a former Ecuadorean judge who alleged that Donziger had arranged him to ghostwrite the verdict of the lawsuit against Chevron, the case's judge would sign it, and the two would split $500,000 given by the plaintiffs, led by Donziger. In Kaplan's conclusion of the case, he highlighted this as primary evidence for the racketeering charge. An international tribunal in October 2016 held in Washington, DC found that Guerra had falsified his testimony.[4] During the trial, Chevron General Counsel Hew Pate authorized payments of USD$2 million to Alberto Guerra, a witness who was paid to falsely testify that Donziger had approved a bribe in Ecuador.[4]

Appeals and prosecution of Donziger

As part of the appeal process after the initial ruling, Donziger was ordered by Kaplan to submit his cellphone and computer as evidence. Donziger refused, arguing that doing so would violate the attorney-client privilege of his other clients, and was charged with contempt of court by Kaplan. In a move described as "virtually unprecedented" by The Intercept, Kaplan appointed a private law firm to prosecute Donziger after the Southern District Court of New York declined to do so; Donziger is under house arrest awaiting trial.[2] Jacobin notes the law firm apppointed by Kaplan, Seward & Kissel, is a private firm that has represented Chevron directly as recently as 2018. [5]

Donziger's contempt charge and house arrest have been harshly condemned by legal advocates. Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson criticized Chevron and Kaplan, asserting that the corruption and bribery was a "means to protect the oil company from having to answer for its degradation of the Amazon."[6] In 2020, a group of twenty-nine Nobel laureates condemned "judicial harassment" by Chevron and urged the release of Donziger.[7] Human rights campaigners have described the treatment of Donziger as an example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP), which are used to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition.[8]

The European Parliament, one of the three branches of the European Union, requested that the Congressional Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties investigate Chevron's treatment, describing such treatment as "not consistent with what has traditionally been the strong support in the United States for the rule of law generally and for protection for human rights defenders in particular".[9][10]

References
  1. Krauss, Clifford (30 July 2013). "Lawyer Who Beat Chevron in Ecuador Faces Trial of His Own". The New York Times. Retrieved 13 May 2020.
  2. "How the Lawyer Who Beat Chevron Lost Everything". The Intercept. 29 January 2020. Retrieved 30 January 2020.
  3. The Editorial Board (13 July 2018). "Opinion: Steven Donziger Gets His Due". Wall Street Journal.
  4. Hershaw, Eva (2015-10-26). "Chevron's Star Witness Admits to Lying in the Amazon Pollution Case". Vice. Retrieved 2020-04-18.
  5. Sirota, David; Bragman, Walker (14 July 2020). "The US Government Gave Big Oil the Power to Prosecute Its Biggest Critic". Jacobin magazine.
  6. "Charles Nesson Joins Attorney and HLS Alumnus' Challenge Against Chevron | Berkman Klein Center". cyber.harvard.edu. 2019-03-25. Retrieved 2020-04-18.
  7. Jonathan Watts (April 18, 2020). "Nobel laureates condemn 'judicial harassment' of environmental lawyer". www.theguardian.com. Retrieved April 18, 2020.
  8. James North (March 31, 2020). "How a Human Rights Lawyer Went From Hero to House Arrest". www.thenation.com. Retrieved May 6, 2020.
  9. Weyler, Rex (10 August 2020). "How did a lawyer who took on big oil and won end up under house arrest?". Mother Jones.
  10. Weyler, Rex (31 July 2020). "Opinion: This lawyer took on Chevron and won the largest human rights and environmental court judgment in history. Then he lost his freedom". National Observer.
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