LeadershipNewspaper: United States Supreme Court has ruled in favour of Royal Dutch Shell and several multinational corporations as the US apex court affirmed the September 2010 decision of the US Court of Appeals for the second circuit relating to the case of Ogoni nationals affected by Shell’s oil connivance with the Nigerian military.

Members of the Kiobel family had brought a case against Royal Dutch Shell in the US, claiming that the corporation violated the alien tort act, by providing material support to deadly military squads from the Nigerian army and police that attacked and murdered several Ogonis in the early 1990s.

But in a majority opinion by the Chief Justice John Roberts yesterday, the US Supreme Cour certified the ruling of the US Court of Appeals that earlier dismissed the lawsuit.

Lawyer to the plaintiffs, Carey R. D’Avino, told SaharaReporters via telephone that the legal team has no comment at the moment as it is currently reviewing the opinion of the Supreme Court.

But in an article by Esther Kiobel, widow of Hon. Barinem Nubari Kiobel, published on ogoni.com., an online site, she had appealed before yesterday’s ruling, saying that “My appeal is that the Supreme Court’s decision on this case may not be like the declaration of the US Appeal Court of the 2nd Circuit, which ensured the connotation that because international law didn’t specifically apportion liability to corporations, or because no corporation had been held liable under international law, corporations could do as they pleased, invariably resulting in further corporate killings, genocide and instability in Africa and such other oppressed lands.”

She explained in the article that “We are holding Shell responsible for the crimes committed against us and the rest of humanity.

“I was stripped naked, tortured, and locked up twice, while my husband and the rest of the Ogoni 9 were maimed, strangled, killed and acidised. I have proofs of those who were paid by Shell, and who were in their payroll to lie, testify, some of them sworn affidavit in court and some of them are in America.

“I do have documents that implicate Shell. The documents were sent through my late husband’s office as Honourable Commissioner for Commerce and Tourism during the Komo administration as military governor of Rivers State. I do have pictures of Shell’s cronies airlifting my husband in their helicopter, dressed in uniform and helmet that bore Shell’s logo.

“ There are also secret documents to prove how Shell tried to bribe my husband in an executive meeting at the government house in Port Harcourt, when they planned to arrest and kill Ken Saro-Wiwa.”

SOURCE: http://leadership.ng/nga/articles/52324/2013/04/18/sarowiwa_kiobel_others_us_supreme_court_dismisses_suit_against_shell.html

EDITORIAL
A Giant Setback for Human Rights

The Supreme Court’s conservatives dealt a major blow Wednesday to the ability of American federal courts to hold violators of international human rights accountable. The court declared that a 1789 law called the Alien Tort Statute does not allow foreigners to sue in American courts to seek redress “for violations of the law of nations occurring outside the United States.”

In the case at issue, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, Nigerian citizens alleged that, from 1992 to 1995, multinational oil companies working in Nigeria aided the military dictatorship that tortured and killed protesters who fought the environmental damage caused by the oil operations. These companies did business in the United States. But Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, said that even where claims of atrocities “touch and concern the territory of the United States, they must do so with sufficient force” to overcome a presumption that the statute does not apply to actions outside this country.

That presumption radically revises and undermines the way the statute has been applied for a generation. It has been limited by the types of human rights abuses it covers — but not by where they take place. The effect is to greatly narrow the statute’s reach.

The court’s four moderate liberals, in an opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer, agreed with the majority that the Kiobel case should not go forward in an American court. The conduct in this case happened abroad, Justice Breyer wrote, and “based solely upon the defendants’ minimal and indirect American presence,” it would be “far-fetched to believe” the case “helps to vindicate a distinct American interest.”

But he persuasively argued against the majority’s evisceration of the Alien Tort Statute. Under the court’s reasoning, it is likely that the 1980 federal appeals court ruling that first used the statute in a significant human rights case would have been thrown out of court. It is likely that many other cases brought by foreign nationals against foreign individuals, and against corporations since 1997, would have been thrown out, too.

In 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that the law allowed suits in federal courts by foreigners against the most abhorrent foreign violators of universally accepted rights, like torturers and perpetrators of genocide, even when the abuses took place in other countries, as long as the defendants had sufficient contact with the United States.

Congress has not tried to limit that interpretation of the statute.

Justice Breyer said suits under the law should be allowed when “the defendant’s conduct substantially and adversely affects an important American national interest, and that includes a distinct interest in preventing the United States from becoming a safe harbor (free of civil as well as criminal liability) for a torturer or other common enemy of mankind.”

The conservative majority regrettably made it much more difficult to vindicate that interest.

SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/opinion/the-supreme-courts-setback-for-human-rights.html?_r=0