Kiobel case: Corporate accountability for human rights abuses

The United States Supreme Court is poised to issue a ruling in the case of Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum. The stakes are enormous - the case will determine whether victims of human rights abuses on foreign soil, who often lack any other viable legal remedy, can bring suit against corporations in US courts.

The underlying facts of the Kiobel case are deeply disturbing. In the 1990s, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People was comprised of a group of activists advocating for environmental and social justice surrounding oil exploration by Royal Dutch Shell and its subsidiaries in the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta. Amid severe repression, nine members of the movement, including Dr Barinem Kiobel, were arrested, charged with specious crimes, tortured and summarily hanged. Dr Kiobel's widow Esther and 11 other plaintiffs, all either victims of torture or relatives of victims residing in the US brought a class action suit in the US District Court.

According to the plaintiffs, Royal Dutch Petroleum, parent company of Shell, was complicit with the brutal Nigerian dictatorship in "a widespread and systematic campaign of torture, extrajudicial executions, prolonged arbitrary detention, and indiscriminate killings constituting crimes against humanity to violently suppress this movement".

The suit was brought under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a law enacted in 1789 to confer jurisdiction on the federal courts to hear claims brought by non-US citizens alleging violations of international law. The ATS was an obscure statute that had been dormant for almost two centuries until a pioneering lawsuit filed by the family of Joelito Filartiga - the 17-year-old son of a Paraguayan activist who was tortured and killed by a police inspector, who was by then a resident in the US.

In 1980, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held in Filartiga v Pena Irala that the ATS conferred jurisdiction for violations of universally accepted human rights norms committed by actors vested with official authority.

Several decades passed before the next ground-breaking development in ATS litigation, when victims of the Burmese military junta sued Unocal for its complicity with widespread and egregious abuses committed during construction of a transnational oil pipeline, including murders, rape, violent evictions and forced labour. After years of legal posturing, the case ultimately settled in 2004 for an undisclosed sum, and plaintiffs were compensated for the abuses they suffered. The case's success prompted dozens of other victims of human rights abroad to seek justice from corporations under the ATS.

(2013-04-02/aljazeera)