Aspiring oil-producing developing countries like Guyana would do well to pay close interest to last Friday’s decision by Britain’s Supreme Court that clears the way for a group of Nigerian farmers to sue the Anglo-Dutch oil company, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, over pollution in a region of Nigeria where the energy giant operates an oil recovery subsidiary.
The ruling in the British courts asserts that Shell may owe a “duty to care” to the more than 40,000 members of Nigeria’s Ogale and Bille communities and that the claimants have the legal authority to sue the Royal Dutch subsidiary in the British courts.
In 2015 the communities moved to the courts in the UK alleging that extensive water and soil contamination had resulted from decades of oil spills and that these occurrences have negatively impacted the lives of thousands of people in the Niger River Delta, where the Shell subsidiary has operated for decades.