Read the latest insights and analysis from the experts at Oil Change International.
Last month, it was widely reported that another chapter in Shell’s dirty and disastrous eighty-seven-year operations in the Niger Delta was coming to an end, with the company selling its onshore business.
In 2017, Esther Kiobel and three other widows of the Ogoni 9, brought a new legal case against Shell in the Netherlands for complicity in murdering their husbands. And today was judgement day in the Hague. A day for hope. A day of dreams. However, those dreams were to be shattered. But this is not the end of the fight.
We ask you to vote for Shell in Corporate Accountability’s Hall of Shame for denying justice in Nigeria for a generation and for delaying action on climate change.
Last Friday, in an historic judgement, Shell’s day finally came. A Dutch court ordered that Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary pay compensation for oil spills in the Niger Delta that stretch back decades. Do not underestimate this moment.
Why does the fight for justice take so long? Why is it so difficult to hold Big Oil to account? Why does it take years even decades to drag oil executives, kicking and screaming, into a court-room?
“Shell’s concern, deeper than its fossil-fuel identity and more urgent than the climate crisis, is Shell. I don’t believe it’s going to lead us to the Paris climate goals, and Shell probably doesn’t believe it will either.”
We are struck by some parallels between the Ogoni struggle, the insistent energy of the recent School Strikes and Extinction Rebellion's actions over the past weeks.
