‘Shell Wins Oil Spill Court Case Against Nigeria’ 5 December 2019

Shell has won a court ruling that blocks the enforcement of more than a half a billion dollars for damages against the oil supermajor in a decade-old oil spill case in Nigeria, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.   A Nigerian court ruled back in 2010 that Shell was liable for an oil spill in the Ejama-Ebubu community in 2001, and awarded the sum plus interest to the community. Shell, which has fought several lawsuits over oil spills in the Niger Delta in the 1990s and early 2000s, has also sought to have the cases transferred to Nigerian courts instead of in UK courts.

Shell and its Nigerian unit have also been dragged through the courts over the supermajor’s alleged complicity in abuses of human rights in Nigeria’s military suppressing protests in the oil-rich Niger Delta in the 1990s, especially in the Ogoniland area.  In early 2018, the UK Court of Appeal ruled that Nigerian communities cannot pursue Shell in UK courts over oil spills in the oil-rich Niger Delta, upholding a previous High Court ruling that UK-based multinational companies cannot be tried in England for the actions of their subsidiaries overseas.