'Long-Overdue' Trial to Begin After Decades of Shell Polluting Nigeria

After years of delay tactics, Shell is set to go on trial in London this week over claims that hundreds of spills caused by the fossil fuel giant have destroyed Nigerian communities and violated their residents' rights to a clean and healthy environment.

Critics say Shell has managed to avoid accountability for despoiling the environment in and around Bille and Ogale communities in the Niger Delta. Ten years ago, residents of these communities sued Shell, claiming inhabitants' livelihoods, homes, and environment had been devastated by Shell oil spills, which killed fish and vegetation and left thousands of people without access to clean drinking water.

As Bille and Ogale communities attempted to fight London-based Shell in U.K. courts, the company repeatedly delayed the case, claiming it was not legally liable for the pollution caused by its subsidiary, the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria. However, in 2021 the U.K. Supreme Court ruled that the High Court should hear the case, and last December, the country's Court of Appeals allowed it to be heard.

"The Bille and Ogale communities of Nigeria's Niger Delta oil-producing region have been living with the devastating impact of oil pollution for so long," Amnesty International Nigeria director Isa Sanusi said in a statement Monday. "Oil companies, particularly Shell, exposed them to multiple oil spills that have done permanent damage to farmlands, waterways, and drinking water—leaving them unable to farm or fish."

"Water contamination and other impacts affect even babies that are in some cases born with deformities," Sanusi added. "These communities have been deprived of a good standard of living. They deserve justice and effective remediation, and I hope this long-overdue trial goes someway to providing it."

In 2023, the U.K. Supreme Court ruled in a separate but related case that it was too late for Nigerian plaintiffs to sue a pair of Shell subsidiaries over a 2011 spill of an estimated 40,000 barrels of oil.

Amnesty International has called the Niger Delta "one of the most polluted places on Earth."

Accountability has been rare, but in 2021 Shell agreed to pay $111 million for oil spills in the Niger Delta. This, in a year in which the company reported adjusted 2020 earnings of nearly $5 billion.

Last December, Nigeria's Ministry of Petroleum Resources approved Shell's sale of $2.4 billion in offshore and shallow-water assets to Renaissance Group, a Nigerian firm, marking the end of nearly a century of Shell's operations in the African nation. The Nigerian government is also currently in talks with local communities about resuming oil production in Ogoniland, which has been devastated by spills over the past half-century.

Responding to the U.K. Court of Appeals' greenlighting of the case set to be heard later this week, Bille Chief Bennett Okpoki said in December that "this has taken a very long time as Shell has been delaying for around 10 years."

"The spills have terribly affected the Bille community," he continued. "Our ecosystems are dead. Our livelihood depends on fishing. After the oil spills, we have found it very difficult to survive and people are not finding it easy. We hope it continues, so we can have a final victory over Shell, at least for them to come and do the cleanup, to put us in the place we were before."