Epic court battle between Ecuadorian villagers and Chevron moves to Canada
The long-running lawsuit against Chevron over the dumping of toxic waste in the Amazonian region of Ecuador enters a new phase today. A court in Toronto, Canada will spend the week hearing arguments for and against seizing Canadian-held assets of the company to pay damages resulting from an eight-year long trial originally heard in Ecuador...Paul Paz y Miño, Associate Director at Amazon Watch, an environmental non-profit that has campaigned on behalf of affected communities for more than 15 years...[He said that] there’s quite a lot at stake, and it’s mostly because this case is probably one of the most clear cut cases of environmental violations that anyone has ever seen. And yet, despite that fact, 50 years after the deliberate dumping began, Chevron has still avoided having to pay to clean up their mess. That’s because they’ve spent billions of dollars to escape justice, and this raises the question in general, “What can corporations get away with and where can they flee to avoid justice when they’ve harmed people and the environment?”...The Canadian courts are going to decide, one, whether or not that argument works and Chevron Canada can escape and shouldn’t have to be part of the enforcement, and two, whether or not Chevron’s claims that the case should be thrown out are actually valid. That’s actually an entire, new saga of Chevron’s concocted story of a fraudulent case in Ecuador. They have zero respect for the courts of Ecuador, in fact, they and this U.S. Judge Kaplan decided and ruled that every single level of the Ecuadorian judicial system was corrupt and dismissed it completely out of hand. Fortunately, the Canadian justice system as a lot more respect for international law and for other countries...