Steven Donziger, the embattled human rights legal professional, has urged Joe Biden to supply him a pardon for his function in defending Indigenous tribes in Ecuador towards the oil business, the place his efforts ended with him being sued by Chevron and spending time in jail and lots of of days underneath home arrest.
In an interview with the Guardian from his Manhattan house, Donziger stated a pardon would “ship a transparent sign to firms that they’ll by no means once more criminally prosecute and jail good individuals who maintain them accountable for abuses”.
Donziger sounded defiant as ever, buoyed by information of practically three dozen members of Congress sending a letter urging Biden to pardon him earlier than leaving workplace. The letter was despatched the day earlier than Biden commuted the sentences of 1,500 individuals and pardoned 39, a single-day report.
Donziger laid out how a presidential pardon may assist reverse the continuing fallout he withstands from a lawsuit spanning many years, during which he represented Indigenous individuals of the Ecuadorian Amazon looking for justice after Texaco spilled thousands and thousands of gallons of oil of their water and on their land.
Texaco merged with Chevron, and Donziger ultimately and famously obtained a $9.5bn judgment towards the oil firm in an Ecuadorian courtroom, in 2011 – solely to have to show round and start defending himself from what would turn out to be a decade-plus of authorized counterattacks.
The oil firm alleged Donziger had obtained the consequence by bribery and fraud. The middle of their claims was the allegation that plaintiffs had bribed Alberto Guerra, the Ecuadorian choose within the case. The oil firm had lobbied a New York courtroom, the place the case started, to maneuver the case to Ecuador.
Guerra himself would debunk Chevron’s claims in 2015, reversing earlier testimony. Nonetheless, a New York district courtroom put Donziger underneath house arrest for 993 days, ending in April 2022, after he was charged with contempt of courtroom, a misdemeanor, for refusing to show over his cellphone and pc to the federal choose within the case, asserting attorney-client privilege.
This made Donziger “the one lawyer in US historical past to be topic to any interval of detention on a misdemeanor contempt of courtroom cost”, in line with the letter to Biden signed by 34 members of Congress – together with senators Bernie Sanders and Sheldon Whitehouse and representatives James P McGovern and Jamie Raskin.
One other final result of the case: the federal authorities confiscated his passport. “I haven’t seen my shoppers [in Ecuador] for 5 years,” Donziger instructed the Guardian. “That is after touring to Ecuador each month for 20 years.”
Donziger additionally misplaced his license to observe regulation – “on the urging of Chevron and and not using a listening to”, in line with the letter. Added to the truth that the federal authorities additionally froze his financial institution accounts, the lawyer now helps himself partly by donations to a authorized fund, he stated.
The human rights legal professional summed up his present state of affairs: “Despite the fact that detention ended, I’m nonetheless not free.” And though Biden’s pardon wouldn’t immediately change the conditions together with his passport, license to observe regulation or checking account, Donziger stated it “can be enormously useful” to him looking for a reversal of every.
Additionally, though “the pardon is critical for private causes, it’s additionally mandatory for principled causes affecting everybody in society”, he stated. Within the many years since he started the case in Ecuador in 1993, “there’s an rising consolidation of company energy over society, significantly in our courts, to weaponize the regulation and assault activists as a way to shield earnings”.
“Within the earlier a part of my profession, authorities and courts appeared to be extra impartial events,” he stated.
This development has been evidenced in his case at varied junctures – maybe most notably in 2019 when a federal choose requested a district courtroom in New York to prosecute Donziger, and the courtroom made the weird choice to nominate a non-public company regulation agency to do the job. It was later revealed that the agency had performed work for Chevron.
“That is distressing for me as a human rights lawyer – the deterioration of individuals’s rights and skill to entry justice,” Donziger stated.
The New York-based legal professional has spent latest years writing a ebook in regards to the case, consulting with human rights teams and doing a little public talking. He sometimes writes columns for the Guardian.
He got here to Atlanta in 2023 to take part in a panel in regards to the motion to cease a police coaching middle from being in-built a forest south-east of town, colloquially often called “Cop Metropolis”. The Atlanta Police Basis, a non-public entity, is constructing the $109m coaching middle with thousands and thousands in company donations.
Donziger stated activists concerned in that motion have been “attacked due to this development”, calling it “one of the crucial historic protest actions in American historical past”. State prosecutors have indicted 61 individuals underneath Georgia’s Rico regulation in reference to opposition to Cop Metropolis, making it the most important criminal-conspiracy case ever aimed toward a protest motion.
“These are usually not simply disparate occasions occurring randomly,” Donziger stated, referring once more to “company energy … weaponiz[ing] regulation”.
If Donziger had been to obtain a pardon, and will receive his passport and regulation license, his plan is to “proceed to help my shoppers in Ecuador to remediate their ancestral lands”.
Donziger famous that different legal professionals proceed to work on the case – however, many years after oil was spilled, a whole clean-up hasn’t occurred. Because of this, he stated, “there are excessive most cancers charges and lots of well being issues, and a few of their tradition is decimated by the air pollution”.
“Cash is required to scrub up the air pollution and restore entry to the land,” he stated. The case is about company accountability and local weather justice, Donziger asserted. “Polluters can’t get away with offloading the prices of their air pollution onto communities. Attempting to get Chevron to pay for the price of air pollution – why is that so controversial?”
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