Steven R. Donziger

Steven R. Donziger (born in 1961) is a Harvard-educated American lawyer, former public defender, writer, speaker and environmental activist who came to prominence representing indigenous groups and farmer communities in Ecuador's rainforest (specifically around the Lago Agrio oil field) in a case against the former oil field operator Texaco, now part of Chevron Corporation. The class action case was originally filed in 1993 on behalf of an estimated 30,000 rainforest villagers in federal court in New York, but in 2001 a U.S. federal judge moved it to Ecuador’s courts at Chevron’s request after the company accepted jurisdiction there.

On February 14, 2011, following an eight-year environmental trial that generated a 220,000-page record, a local court in Ecuador ordered Chevron Corporation to pay $18.1 billion to the affected communities. The funds were ordered to be put in a trust set up under the court order and used for a clean-up. The court designated the funds to compensate the affected communities for environmental harm resulting from the abandonment of hundreds of unlined waste pits and the dumping of billions of gallons of toxic oil waste into waterways relied on by local inhabitants for their drinking water. Locals call the area the “Amazon Chernobyl” and claim it is the worst oil-related disaster in the world. The verdict, believed to be the largest environmental judgment ever from a trial court, was unanimously affirmed by an intermediate appellate court in 2012 and by Ecuador’s Supreme Court in 2013, but the latter court was later reduced the award too $9.5 billion by striking a punitive penalty.

Following the judgment, Chevron refused to pay the award and vowed to fight the claimants “until hell freezes over”. Chevron claimed it had been victimized by fraud in Ecuador including the bribery of the trial judge. The appellate courts in Ecuador reviewed and rejected Chevron’s fraud allegations. Donziger and his clients are now pursuing international enforcement actions in courts in Canada and Brazil to seize Chevron assets to force the company to pay the Ecuador judgment. The action in Canada is the most advanced. Chevron previously had assets frozen by the villagers in Argentina, until Argentina's Supreme Court freed the assets in June 2013.

In 2015, the Canada Supreme Court in a unanimous opinion rejected a Chevron jurisdictional challenge to the enforcement action and ruled that the Ecuadorians had a right to use the Ecuador judgment try to seize Chevron’s assets in that country. The Canadian enforcement action is now in a trial court in Toronto where a judge will determine whether the Ecuador judgment is enforceable under Canadian law. Chevron’s main defense in Canada is that the company’s assets there are held by a wholly owned subsidiary, Chevron Canada. Chevron claims that by law such assets cannot be seized; the villagers disagree and the issue is being litigated.

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