Ending a Shell game
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A HEARTENING human rights precedent was established last week when the Royal Dutch Shell company and its Nigerian subsidiary settled a suit brought in a Manhattan court. The suit charged the company with complicity in the 1995 execution by a Nigerian military regime of nine activists who had been protesting Shell practices on behalf of the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta.
The respected author, environmentalist, and human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was among the protesters put to death in 1995 after a bogus trial. Shell has agreed to pay $15.5 million to Saro-Wiwa’s son and other relatives of the executed activists, a portion of which will go into a trust for social programs in the region affected by Shell’s oil spills and gas flaring. Now, multinational corporations can no longer count on impunity for human rights abuses and environmental degradation in lands where they extract valuable resources.
Shell correctly notes that settling out of court is not an admission of guilt, but some implications of the $15.5 million payment are hard to ignore. Shell’s settlement avoided a trial, in which human rights lawyers would have presented evidence that the company colluded with a brutal military regime in bribing witnesses to give false testimony against Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues. And Shell’s polluting practices would have been aired in court.
So Shell saved itself costly embarrassment. But in doing so it set a precedent that ought to reverberate around the world. From now on, poor communities everywhere can seek justice in a Western court for violations of human rights by even the most powerful multinational corporations.
