'Farmers and Fishermen to Challenge World Bank Group Immunity Ruling', 18 Feb 2020

A fishing and farming community in Gujarat, India will challenge a ruling from a federal judge in the District of Columbia that the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – part of the World Bank Group – is immune from being sued for damages inflicted by a coal-fired power plant that it negligently funded. EarthRights International represents the community, which first filed the Jam v. IFC suit in 2015, and won a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court last year that the IFC does not have “absolute” immunity to all lawsuits. On Friday evening, United States District Judge John D. Bates again granted the IFC’s motion to dismiss, finding that the IFC is immune under the facts of this case...

The construction and operation of the 4,150MW power plant along the Gujarat coast is harming livelihoods and destroying the natural resources that generations of local families have relied on for fishing, farming, salt-panning, and animal rearing. The plaintiffs originally tried to raise their concerns through the IFC’s internal grievance mechanism, but when the IFC’s leadership ignored the grievance body’s conclusions, they filed suit in the United States as a last resort... 

Jam v. IFC marks the first time project-affected communities have taken legal action to hold an international financial institution like the IFC accountable for funding and enabling a harmful project. On February 27, 2019, in a historic 7-1 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that international organizations like the World Bank Group can be sued in U.S. courts in certain cases. In Friday’s decision, however, Judge Bates decided that the Jam case does not qualify, because, he ruled, it is not “based upon a commercial activity carried on in the United States.”...

The IFC’s own internal compliance mechanism, the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO), issued a scathing report in 2013 confirming that the IFC had failed to ensure the Tata Mundra project complied with the environmental and social conditions of the IFC’s loan at virtually every stage of the project and calling for the IFC to take remedial action...