Eleven thousand Nigerians in thirty-five delta villages have sued Royal Dutch Shell in the London High Court for damages from two oil spills in 2008 that the plaintiffs say destroyed their livelihoods. A settlement offer from Shell was rejected by the plaintiffs as too low. The company has admitted responsibility for two spills in the Niger Delta. Shell says 4,000 barrels of oil were spilled in Bodo. The spill was cleaned in 2009 but more spills occurred as a result of sabotage and theft. The plaintiffs' counsel puts the spilled oil figure at 600,000 barrels with no more than 1% attributable to "bunkering" or illegal siphoning. Amnesty International pegged the figure at 280,000 barrels, more than the Exxon Valdez spill and called on Shell to pay $1billion to clean up the delta. The delta is a maze of creeks and wetlands where fishermen live in mud huts with no electricity. The presence of a high tech industry with well paid workers has led to deep resentment among the native villagers. Pipeline sabotage is a regular occurrence. Hard feelings against Shell also stem from the hanging of environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa by the dictatorship with which Shell cooperated. Shell paid $15.5 million as a settlement to the families of the nine activists who were killed in 1995.
A similar lawsuit for water contamination was filed in the US, but the Supreme Court granted certiorari in two cases to consider if the Alien Tort Statute of 1789 protects the corporation from US suits for international law violations that take place outside the United States. Chevron has been fighting a similar case for damages arising out of spills in Ecuador's Amazon region for nearly two decades. A judgement was entered against Chevron for $18 billion by an Ecuadorian judge, but Chevron has prevented enforcement of the judgement against it with conflicting legal actions in various international venues.