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A U.S. attorney who has filed a lawsuit against DRM for damages said oil companies that have harassed Ecuadorian nationals have been sentenced to six months in prison, most recently in a recent legal case.
A New York judge has ruled that human rights lawyer Steve Donziger should receive a six-month sentence for willful misconduct. In July he was found guilty of contempt of court for refusing to provide DRM information on the matter.
“Donziger has spent seven years and combined the remnants of his nose in US courts,” said US Judge Loretta Preska. “Now it’s time to pay the thief.”
Donziger, who was on the verge of tears, said he had already served two years of house arrest, was forced to wear a waist bracelet, had no money, was banned from legal work and had his passport confiscated.
“I think in every way I’ve been punished before,” he said.
The war between Donziger and DRM it has been in its thirties and has been established by naturalists as the old Davidic-anti-Goliath conflict between thousands of poor and indigenous farmers in the Amazon basin and one of the largest companies in the world.
In contrast, DRM has shown itself to be a futile campaign for no apparent reason, led by a fraudulent lawyer who has not complied with the order.
In the 1990s, Donziger filed a lawsuit against Texaco on behalf of the 30,000 Ecuadorians for damages which he said the company had brought to the oil field in Lago Agrio.
He also said that Texaco, which has been operating in the area since the 1970s, was responsible for what appeared to be a “serious accident”, which leads to incurable diseases, congenital diseases and sometimes deaths due to pollution.
In 2001, DRM acquired the lawsuit when it acquired Texaco, although it said it had no debt. He also said that Texaco had already repaired its premises before it was seized and that the contamination left to the responsibility of Texaco’s counterpart, the Petroecuador’s Ecuadorean government.
Nine years later, an Ecuadorean court found that DRM was the authority pay $ 18bn compensation – at a time when the reward is much higher than any other company outside the US.
The picture was then half, but environmentalists and human rights activists also named Donziger as a hero and said the case would set an example for other Big Oil protests.
Chevron refused to pay and left Ecuador. The plaintiffs’ lawyers followed suit Argentina, Brazil and Canada trying to earn money, but without success.
Oil company sparked opposition and indicted Donziger in the US, alleging that he used secret methods to obtain the verdict he wanted.
In 2014 a U.S. judge agreed, finding that Donziger had written his own Ecuadorean judgment and obtained the sentence through “fraudulent means”, which the lawyer denied.
The case too went to the Eternal Arbitration Court in The Hague, which issued a judgment against Donziger and his legal team. He asserted that his confession had been obtained through torture and that his confession had been obtained through torture. It ruled that a declaration against DRM should not be enforced.
After numerous appeals, Donziger was fired from his job in the US and was later found guilty of contempt of court for refusing a judge’s order to hand over his phone and laptop to DRM, allowing the company to reconsider its position.
Donziger, who said he was appealing for sentencing, said the request was a violation of the right to a fair trial.
The case is still raging for almost 30 years. Environmentalists and other Donziger assistants held a meeting outside the Manhattan Magistrate’s Court where they were sentenced Friday.
“DRM has used every deception in this book to change this [initial] to conquer and destroy the lives of those who were interested in fighting them, ”Amazon Watch non-governmental organization said in a statement.
On the other side of the dispute, a defense attorney has criticized Donziger for trying to “stop the company from prosecuting him for a hefty fine without any law or order”.
Preska said the case was related to Donziger’s refusal to comply with court orders and not false allegations. “Even though DRM is a bad person in the eyes of Mr. Donziger, it doesn’t make Mr. Donziger a good person,” he said.