'Lawyer Steven Donziger gets six-month sentence for contempt in Chevron battle', 1 October 2021

Steven Donziger, the US indigenous rights campaigner and lawyer who spent decades battling the energy firm Chevron over pollution in the Ecuadorian rainforest, was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment on Friday for criminal contempt charges arising from a lawsuit brought by the oil giant. Friday’s sentence ... came a day after he asked the court to consider an opinion by independent United Nations experts that found his court-ordered home confinement of more than two years was a violation of international human rights law. The UN experts’ opinion said the US breached international law by putting Donziger under house arrest for about four times the maximum sentence of six months that he has now received in his contempt case... While Preska was not bound to consider the UN experts’ testimony that Donziger had been unlawfully confined, she imposed an unexpectedly tough sentence...

[In a] 2014 civil case ... a Manhattan judge barred US enforcement of a $9.5bn judgment against Chevron Corp that Donziger had won in the Ecuadorian courts in 2011. Chevron has never paid up, claiming “shocking levels of misconduct” and fraud by Donziger and the Ecuadorian judiciary. In the US, a judge agreed and said the Ecuadorian decision had been secured through bribery, fraud and extortion. Donziger was ordered to turn over his computer, phones and other electronic devices. That later escalated into a criminal case when he failed to do so...

Donziger described how his crusade against Chevron on behalf of indigenous people affected by oil pollution in the Amazon rainforest had turned and that he had become the victim of a “planned targeting by a corporation to destroy my life”... In March, he claimed he was being tried “by a Chevron-connected judge and prosecuted by a Chevron-connected lawyer? It’s just wrong,” Donziger said...