40,000 Nigerians Want Justice for Shell's Decades of Oil Spills

The king of the Ogale people, a Nigerian tribe, filed a lawsuit this week against Shell in a London court alleging that decades of oil spills have fouled the water and destroyed the lives of thousands of fisherfolk and farmers in the Niger River Delta.

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During an audience on Tuesday at Britain’s High Court, King Emere Godwin Bebe Okpabi put four bottles of water from his homeland on a table as a proof of oil pollution that he blames on Royal Dutch Shell in his country, where the company has operated since the 1950s.

"My people are drinking this water," said the tribal king. He added that an English court is his only hope to end the suffering on his people.

"Shell is Nigeria and Nigeria is Shell. You can never, never defeat Shell in a Nigerian court. The truth is that the Nigerian legal system is corrupt," he said.

Environmentalist organizations and lawyers supporting this cause have warned that the Nigerian water is contaminated with oil and cancer-causing compounds such as benzene. Lawyers for more than 40,000 Nigerians are demanding action from Shell to clean up oil spills.

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The multinational oil giant argues that the case should be heard in Nigeria, pointing out it involves its subsidiary in that country.

The case is being handled by London law firm Leigh Day, which in 2009 won a case against Shell over damage caused by oil spills in India. During that time, the company had to pay US$83.5 million in compensation to the Bodo people, a native community in northern India.

During the recent United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP21, a group of countries led by Ecuador proposed the creation of an international ecological tribunal to deal with ecological crimes such as these. However, the proposal was not included in the Paris Agreement.