TWO communities in Nigeria’s Niger Delta are one step closer to taking oil giant Shell to court after a landmark decision by the London High Court.
The ruling, which was made at the end of last year, follows an eight-year legal battle in which Shell PLC argued that compensation claims for environmental damage could not be heard in a London courtroom because it was not legally responsible for the actions of its Nigerian subsidiary, SPDC.
‘This ruling is a significant moment in the eight-year battle to get Shell to take responsibility for the oil pollution that has blighted their land,’ said Matthew Renshaw of Leigh Day, the London-based law firm representing the 13,000 villagers of Ogale and Bille.
‘During this time, Shell has repeatedly resorted to using technicalities to try to block and delay our clients’ claims. We now hope to move without further delay towards a trial where our clients’ claims for a full clean-up and compensation for the destruction of their way of life can be fully heard.’
In her 60-page judgement that followed a five-day hearing in July, Mrs Justice May said it could be argued the pollution has fundamentally breached the villagers’ right to a clean environment under the Nigerian Constitution and the African Charter. If the class action results in a successful trial, it will be the first time in legal history that a UK multinational will have been found to have breached a communities’ right to a clean environment.
‘We have come from a very long way to get to where we are and it is what we have been looking for,’ said Lazarus Tamana, a veteran environmental activist in Ogoniland, the small kingdom in Rivers State where the two communities are located.
‘If this case were to take to place in Nigeria, as Shell had wanted, it could not succeed. London is a very different matter.’
Ogoniland has been an historic flashpoint in the battle against the operations of Shell and other oil multinationals in Niger Delta following the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight fellow environmental campaigners in 1995. Saro-Wiwa, a popular Nigerian author and broadcaster, headed up the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (Mosop), which forced Shell to withdraw from Ogoniland following a series of mass peaceful protests against the contamination of fisheries and farmlands, the main source of income.
Although Ogoniland remains off-limits to Shell, the company’s pipelines criss-cross the area on their way to the hydrocarbon terminal on Bonny Island. These are old and require regular maintenance to prevent spillages, Tamana, Mosop’s current leader, told Africa Briefing.
‘Shell should concentrate on taking better care of its equipment, some of which is 65 years old, and they should change their attitude towards the communities they operate in. They behave as if they do not care about the pollution they cause, the loss of livelihoods and the damage to people’s health.”
Shell, which has been drilling for oil in the Niger Delta since the early 1950s and now plans to close down its operations in Nigeria, blames pipe damage on oil theft carried out on an ‘industrial scale’.
‘This criminality is a major source of pollution and is the cause of the majority of spills in the Bille and Ogale claims,’ it said in a statement.
In 2015, Leigh Day secured a £55 million settlement with Shell on behalf of the people of Bodo, also in Ogoniland, after two spills of almost half a million barrels of oil destroyed streams and mangroves and made people ill. In 2018, Shell carried out a clean-up of Bodo Creek. However, Mosop says this has been ineffective and, at its invitation, Greenpeace carried out an investigation of the waters in November. The results are expected to be published at the end of February.