US courts held Shell liable in America for crimes committed in Nigeria

Evidence

In his pursuit of environmental justice, Saro-Wiwa Jr. sought to do an end run around the dysfunctional Nigerian state. He took up the cause as writer and speaker on the international human rights circuit but also, critically, as a lead plaintiff in a fourteen-year-long case against Shell for complicity in his father’s execution and for paying soldiers who had committed human rights abuses in Ogoniland. On June 9, 2009, days before the trial was due to begin in New York, Shell settled out of court, agreeing to pay $15.5 million, mostly into a trust fund for the Ogoni people. The plaintiffs had filed under the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789, which the Supreme Court ruled in 2004 could be used to try in American courts foreigners accused of crimes against humanity overseas. There is a satisfying symmetry to learning that the Alien Tort Claims Act was originally introduced in the eighteenth century to combat piracy, given the piratical practices of the Shell-Abacha partnership under a system that Saro-Wiwa once condemned as “organized brigandage.” — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 348

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ATCA/piracy lineage point already capped in ch24 (State execution manufactures martyrdom) and to the ‘corporations evade host-state law’ strand of the polyad. — connects to: A leaked memo proves state-military repression directly served Shell operations — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 317
• ADDENDUM: Shell’s piratical overseas conduct mirrors the extraction-strategies material in the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s imperial-accountability theme only loosely; chiefly serves cross-course extraction cases.