Today we launched a campaign formally petitioning President Biden to pardon me and restore my full rights as a US citizen. A pardon will help allow me to travel to meet my clients, erase this stain of my unprecedented corporate prosecution on the US justice system, and most importantly help the Amazon communities in Ecuador who have been decimated by Chevron’s toxic dumping of cancer-causing oil waste. I thank you for your support. Here is the official press release announcing the pardon campaign:
URGENT APPEAL TO PRESIDENT BIDEN TO PARDON CLIMATE JUSTICE LAWYER STEVEN DONZIGER
Donziger was privately prosecuted and detained by Chevron after helping Amazon communities win a landmark $10 billion pollution case. The UN, 68 Nobel Laureates, Amnesty International, and three US judges have condemned the prosecution as illegal.
New York, NY (March 20, 2024) – A coalition of 14 prominent attorneys today issued an impassioned plea to President Biden to pardon Steven Donziger, a distinguished US human rights advocate unjustly targeted with the nation’s first corporate prosecution. Donziger, detained from 2019 to 2022 in New York on a misdemeanor contempt charge prosecuted by Chevron, continues to face grave injustice from the oil giant that threatens his safety and the integrity of advocacy for both human rights and climate justice.
Chevron’s relentless pursuit of Donziger – the company used 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers to target him and the Indigenous peoples he represented with an avowed “demonization” campaign – stemmed from his pivotal role in securing a $10 billion pollution judgment against the oil company in Ecuador in 2013. This landmark legal triumph, following years of trial and appellate litigation, exposed Chevron’s practice of flagrant dumping of billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste into the ancestral lands and waterways of the Amazon.
Chevron’s systematic dumping of oil waste in Ecuador decimated five Indigenous nations and triggered a deadly cancer epidemic that is believed to have cost thousands of lives. Tens of thousands of people now face a grave risk of contracting cancer because the company refuses to comply with court orders that it remediate the damage.
The call for the pardon, articulated in a comprehensive 12-page letter to President Biden signed by 14 lawyers, underscores not only the urgent need to protect Donziger but also the need to safeguard all advocates from corporate abuse of the justice system. Donziger’s treatment – condemned as illegal by the United Nations, dozens of international human rights advocates and 68 Nobel Laureates, and even three conservative US federal judges – epitomizes the erosion of the rule of law in the United States in the face of corporate power.
“No matter where one stands on the political spectrum, we should all be able to agree that what happened to me in the United States should not happen to anybody in any country that adheres to the rule of law,” Donziger said. “Corporations should not be allowed to take direct control of a public prosecution from the government and lock up their critics, as happened to me. It’s an outrageous abuse of power that not only wrecked me and my family’s life for three years but also embarrassed our country in the eyes of the world.”
With Donziger’s legal remedies exhausted following the refusal of the US Supreme Court to adjudicate the case, the demand for a pardon from President Biden raises issues of paramount importance in upholding constitutional principles.
“This pardon is not only critical to protect the First Amendment rights of all advocates regardless of their political orientation, but also vital to protect the climate justice movement both in the US and around the world,” wrote Donziger’s attorneys in their letter to the President. The attorneys explain how a pardon would reaffirm commitments of the US to its international human rights obligations and would explicitly condemn private corporate-led prosecutions as illegal.
Donziger added: “I also want to thank from the bottom of my heart the many distinguished lawyers who have agreed to represent me in this campaign.”
The attorneys representing Donziger, all of whom are working pro bono, read like a Who’s Who of the civil rights and justice movements. They include renowned civil rights attorney Martin Garbus, who has represented Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel, and Cesar Chavez in a six-decade career; Natali Segovia, a leading Indigenous rights lawyer and the director of the Water Protector Legal Collective; Jeanne Mirer, the President of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, the world’s largest organization of lawyers; Michael Tigar, Professor Emeritus at Duke who has represented some of the leading political figures in recent American history; Nadine Strossen, the former President of the American Civil Liberties Union; and Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a visiting professor at Yale.
“Around the world, human rights defenders like Steven Donziger are targeted and even killed for their advocacy and work on Indigenous rights and environmental justice issues”, said Segovia, of the Water Protector Legal Collective. “Steven’s case is emblematic of the weaponization of the law by a powerful corporation against a human rights defender using corporate-sponsored prosecution, RICO, and SLAPP tactics. If it could happen to Steven, a Harvard-trained human rights lawyer, it could happen to anyone working to expose environmental crimes.”
Donziger’s unwavering commitment to environmental justice also has drawn international acclaim, leading to endorsements from 68 Nobel Laureates, over 120 civil society organizations, 75 international legal organizations, and the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) along with thousands of individual supporters from dozens of countries worldwide. In 2021, the IADL – the largest global legal organization with hundreds of thousands of members in roughly 60 countries – called the Donziger matter “one of the most important corporate accountability and human rights cases of our time.”
Donziger’s work on the case traces back to the early 1990s when he helped form a team of US lawyers to represent the affected Amazon communities who lived in an area where Chevron gouged more than 1,000 unlined waste pits out of the jungle floor. Chemicals in the pits contaminated soils and groundwater and also were discharged into rivers and streams relied on by locals for their drinking water, bathing, and fishing. Cancer rates in the area quickly skyrocketed, according to independent health evaluations.
In addition to the pardon, Donziger called on President Biden to investigate Chevron for its multiple abuses of the U.S. legal system –– specifically, for submitting false evidence, bribing witnesses, arbitrarily detaining its lead critic, and using the threat of lawsuits to try to intimidate activists. Donziger also said he did not want the pardon to distract attention from the core issue in the case.
“It is critical that people focus on what is of paramount importance, which is the plight of the thousands of people in Ecuador who face a serious risk of death if Chevron does not comply with the rule of law,” Donziger said.
For background on Chevron’s corruption of the US judicial system to target Donziger, read this article in the Guardian by Erin Brockovich. For background on the Ecuador pollution case, see this video from Vice. For Donziger’s perspective on his detention, see this interview with Esquire magazine.
To build financial support for the pardon campaign, please visit this crowdfunding platform. For information on the campaign, go to FreeDonziger.com. Donziger’s personal website is here. To sign a petition to support the pardon, please click here.
Background
The final court decision against Chevron in 2013 over its pollution in Ecuador has been affirmed unanimously for enforcement purposes by the Supreme Courts of Ecuador and Canada and by a total of six different appellate courts and 28 appellate judges. Chevron still refuses to pay the judgment, with a company spokesman saying the oil giant would fight the Indigenous groups in Ecuador “until hell freezes over… and then fight it out on the ice.”
As one of the main lawyers on the case, Donziger was targeted by roughly 2,000 lawyers hired by Chevron. That strategy culminated in 2019 when a Chevron law firm, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, convinced a US judge to let company lawyers prosecute and detain Donziger on a misdemeanor contempt of court charge in the name of the US government after the regular federal prosecutor refused the case. Despite the prosecution, Donziger’s support continued to grow.
Two US Supreme Court justices, in an unusual written opinion, ruled Donziger’s private prosecution violated the Constitution even though the full court decided not to hear/ his appeal. A third federal judge also condemned the prosecution as unconstitutional in a 19-page written decision. Several lawyers from across the political spectrum – including several who clerked for conservative justices at the Supreme Court – stepped up to represent him.
Two groups of international jurists, including one from the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention from the United Nations, condemned Donziger’s prosecution and trial as illegal under international law. The five jurists from the Working Group called the level of judicial bias against Donziger from certain US judges “staggering” and described his mistreatment by the federal judiciary as “appalling”. The Working Group also ordered the US government to release Donziger immediately, compensate him for his illegal detention, and conduct an investigation.
The Biden Administration has not responded to the Working Group’s decision even though it has demanded other WGAD decisions be enforced against governments in nations such as Iran and Turkey.
A second group of international jurists monitored Donziger’s misdemeanor non-jury trial prosecuted by the Chevron lawyers, which took place in May 2021. It issued an 87-page report that concluded the trial violated Donziger’s due process rights and fell below minimal international standards. That 4 group was led by Stephen A. Rapp, the former US Ambassador for War Crimes under the Obama Administration and now a special advisor to the Holocaust Museum; and Catherine Morris, a Canadian human rights attorney.
The private prosecutors from the Chevron law firm also had Donziger’s passport confiscated – to this day Donziger cannot leave the United States – and orchestrated his disbarment without an evidentiary hearing based on a civil finding for the first time in US history. (See links below for background.)
Chevron initiated the targeting of Donziger in 2011 by suing him personally for a record $60 billion just two weeks before his team won the case in Ecuador. The amount was the largest potential damages liability faced by an individual in US history. Around the same time, a company email indicated its main strategy was to “demonize Donziger” rather than litigate the evidence on the merits.
Campaigners at Amazon Watch, including the long-time environmental justice advocate Paul Paz y Miño, have been backing Donziger for years.
“I am inspired by Steven’s courage, resilience, and determination,” said Paz y Miño, the Associate Director at Amazon Watch, which works with Indigenous communities in South America. “That’s why Chevron wants to destroy him. Steven’s very existence creates enormous financial risk to Chevron and to the oil industry generally. Every fossil fuel industry lawyer in this country fears Steven.”
“More broadly, Chevron’s outrageous abuse of power and manipulation of the federal judiciary to target Steven should deeply concern every advocate in the country, particularly those who engage in protest,” said Paz y Miño. “What happened to Steven is a central component of the fossil fuel industry’s playbook to silence public opposition: file SLAPP lawsuits to distract, bankrupt, and even lock up environmental defenders as a way to intimidate others from speaking out.”
Full Quote of Attorney Natali Segovia
“Around the world, human rights defenders like Steven Donziger are targeted and even killed for their advocacy and work on Indigenous rights and environmental justice issues. Such extrajudicial human rights violations have come to be expected occurrences in the global South and “developing” nations at the hands of powerful corporations and extractive corporations who act with impunity and collusion from state governments; for Indigenous Peoples and allies that stand to protect the Earth, this is a known assumption of risk. Steven’s case, however, is emblematic of the weaponization of the law by a powerful corporation against a human rights defender – an attorney, to be exact – and sets a dangerous precedent. We know the criminalization of Water Protectors and Land Defenders is on the rise, now we are seeing the rise of corporate-sponsored prosecution, RICO, and SLAPP tactics. If it could happen to Steven, a Harvard-trained human rights lawyer, it could happen to anyone on climate frontlines. This is what we are guarding against. This is why a pardon for Steven barely hits the tip of the iceberg to reverse course, but is a necessary step in ensuring fundamental rights of due process and human rights in the United States.”
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