Legal action against Shell failed in Nigerian courts. So now villagers from the Niger delta are bringing the fight to Shell in their home country of the Netherlands.
In the latest case of Nigerians seeking justice abroad for crimes within Nigeria, a group of villagers from the Niger delta has taken oil behemoth Royal Dutch Shell to court in the Netherlands over alleged environmental pollution and “corporate crimes”.
Nigeria, the leading oil producer in Africa and eighth largest in the world, has most of its oil deposits located in the wetland and mangrove region of the Niger delta. Decades of oil extraction have left much of the region’s vegetation, farmlands, fishponds and drinking water polluted, and contributed to the impoverishment of much of its local population.
Environmental pollution is typically the result of oil spills caused by poor maintenance of pipelines and facilities, failure to clean up leaks, sabotage of oil installations and oil theft. Blame for this is generally laid at the doorstep the multinational oil companies operating in the area.
A recent report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) documenting pollution in the delta indicted Shell Petroleum Development Corporation (SPDC), the biggest oil and gas company in Nigeria, for the oil spills which are often referred to as the world’s largest. This environmental pollution, greater in volume and intensity than the catastrophic BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, will require the world’s most extensive oil cleanup, estimated to require up to 30 years.
Shell’s spills
These oil spills have devastated communities, destroyed livelihoods, and endangered the health of local populations and the ecosystem. This damage led some victims, most of whom have hardly partaken of the spoils of Nigeria’s immense oil wealth, to seek justice within the Nigerian legal system. This proved futile.
Following this, therefore, four villagers along with the NGO Friends of the Earth took Shell’s parent company, Royal Dutch Shell, to court in its home country of the Netherlands, on charges of polluting land and waterways around their home.
The verdict on the case will be delivered in The Hague in early 2013. The case is linked to a number of spills that occurred between 2004 and 2007 in Goi Ogoniland, Oruma in Bayelsa State and in Ikot Ada Udo, Akwa Ibom state. It is worth noting that Shell is also engaged in other Nigerian legal battles abroad, namely in the United States, over its alleged complicity in human rights abuses and extra-judicial executions of Ogoni activists in 1995 by Nigeria’s former military leader, the late General Sani Abacha.