Los Angeles – After a federal judge found that a case charging Occidental Petroleum with pollution of Amazonian communities should be heard in Peru, the plaintiffs, including indigenous Achuar villagers and the advocacy group Amazon Watch, vowed to continue pursuing all legal means of redress.
“The plaintiffs are fully prepared to litigate this case in Peru, and Oxy will be held liable for their decades of toxic contamination,” said Marco Simons, Legal Director of EarthRights International (ERI), counsel for the plaintiffs. As detailed in A Legacy of Harm, a 2007 report issued by ERI, Amazon Watch, and the Peruvian indigenous advocacy group Racimos de Ungurahui, Oxy’s operations discharged billions of barrels of untreated wastewater into local streams, caused numerous spills and resulted in many unremediated toxic waste sites in Achuar territory, leading to an epidemic of lead and cadmium poisoning and other ill effects on the lives and livelihoods of the indigenous people.
Moving the case to Peru may not serve Oxy’s interests. “When Chevron was sued for similar toxic pollution in the Amazon, they succeeded in moving the case to Ecuador,” said Maria Ramos of Amazon Watch. “Now they’re facing $7-16 billion in damages from the Ecuadorian court.”
The Achuar case, Maynas Carijano v. Occidental Petroleum, No. CV-07-5068, was filed in May 2007. Judge Philip Gutierrez of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled yesterday that the case is more appropriately heard in Peru under the legal doctrine of forum non conveniens. The plaintiffs and their counsel, including ERI, the Venice firm Schonbrun, DeSimone, Seplow, Harris & Hoffman LLP and San Francisco lawyer Natalie Bridgeman, are currently weighing the next steps in the case, including the possibility of appeal.
Amazon Watch is an environmental and human rights organization based in San Francisco, California. We work to help indigenous communities in the Amazon basin defend their territories and culture from the impacts of large-scale industrial “development” such as oil and gas drilling. To learn more, please visit: http://www.amazonwatch.org/.
EarthRights International (ERI) is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization that combines the power of law and the power of people in defense of human rights and the environment. Focusing on earth rights, we work at the intersection of human rights and the environment. We specialize in fact-finding, legal actions against perpetrators of earth rights abuses, training for grassroots and community leaders, and advocacy campaigns that seek to end earth rights abuses and promote and protect earth rights. To learn more, please visit: http://www.amazonwatch.org/.
