Mike Sacks [email protected]
First Posted: 12/15/11 12:53 PM ET Updated: 12/15/11 01:25 PM ET
WASHINGTON — A multinational oil company will be coming to the Supreme Court this winter to argue that corporations are not “natural persons” and therefore cannot be held liable for committing international human rights violations such as torture, extrajudicial killings and crimes against humanity.
The case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, began far from Washington in the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta. About a dozen Nigerians contend that Shell Oil’s parent company aided and abetted the Nigerian government in its violent suppression of environmental and human rights protesters resisting Shell’s operations there in the 1990s. In September 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit accepted the oil company’s argument that as a corporation it’s immune from being sued in the United States for the overseas conduct. Since then, three other appeals courts, looking at the same law, have held otherwise — in cases brought against Exxon, Firestone and Rio Tinto for similar alleged atrocities. read more
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