Steven Donziger, the embattled human rights attorney, has urged Joe Biden to offer him a pardon for his role in defending Indigenous tribes in Ecuador against the oil industry, where his efforts ended with him being sued by Chevron and spending time in jail and hundreds of days under house arrest.
In an interview with the Guardian from his Manhattan apartment, Donziger said a pardon would “send a clear signal to corporations that they can never again criminally prosecute and jail good people who hold them accountable for abuses”.
Donziger sounded defiant as ever, buoyed by news of nearly three dozen members of Congress sending a letter urging Biden to pardon him before leaving office. The letter was sent the day before Biden commuted the sentences of 1,500 people and pardoned 39, a single-day record.
Donziger laid out how a presidential pardon could help reverse the ongoing fallout he withstands from a lawsuit spanning decades, in which he represented Indigenous people of the Ecuadorian Amazon seeking justice after Texaco spilled millions of gallons of oil in their water and on their land.
Texaco merged with Chevron, and Donziger eventually and famously obtained a $9.5bn judgment against the oil company in an Ecuadorian court, in 2011 – only to have to turn around and begin defending himself from what would become a decade-plus of legal counterattacks.
The oil company alleged Donziger had obtained the result through bribery and fraud. The center of their claims was the allegation that plaintiffs had bribed Alberto Guerra, the Ecuadorian judge in the case. The oil company had lobbied a New York court, where the case began, to move the case to Ecuador.
Guerra himself would debunk Chevron’s claims in 2015, reversing earlier testimony. Nonetheless, a New York district court put Donziger under home arrest for 993 days, ending in April 2022, after he was charged with contempt of court, a misdemeanor, for refusing to turn over his cellphone and computer to the federal judge in the case, asserting attorney-client privilege.
This made Donziger “the only lawyer in US history to be subject to any period of detention on a misdemeanor contempt of court charge”, according to the letter to Biden signed by 34 members of Congress – including senators Bernie Sanders and Sheldon Whitehouse and representatives James P McGovern and Jamie Raskin.
Another outcome of the case: the federal government confiscated his passport. “I haven’t seen my clients [in Ecuador] for five years,” Donziger told the Guardian. “This is after traveling to Ecuador every month for 20 years.”
Donziger also lost his license to practice law – “at the urging of Chevron and without a hearing”, according to the letter. Added to the fact that the federal government also froze his bank accounts, the lawyer now supports himself in part through donations to a legal fund, he said.
The human rights attorney summed up his current situation: “Even though detention ended, I’m still not free.” And even though Biden’s pardon wouldn’t directly change the situations with his passport, license to practice law or bank account, Donziger said it “would be enormously helpful” to him seeking a reversal of each.
Also, although “the pardon is necessary for personal reasons, it’s also necessary for principled reasons affecting everyone in society”, he said. In the decades since he began the case in Ecuador in 1993, “there’s an increasing consolidation of corporate power over society, particularly in our courts, to weaponize the law and attack activists in order to protect profits”.
“In the earlier part of my career, government and courts seemed to be more neutral parties,” he said.
This trend has been evidenced in his case at various junctures – perhaps most notably in 2019 when a federal judge asked a district court in New York to prosecute Donziger, and the court made the unusual decision to appoint a private corporate law firm to do the job. It was later revealed that the firm had done work for Chevron.
“This is distressing for me as a human rights lawyer – the deterioration of people’s rights and ability to access justice,” Donziger said.
The New York-based attorney has spent recent years writing a book about the case, consulting with human rights groups and doing some public speaking. He occasionally writes columns for the Guardian.
He came to Atlanta in 2023 to participate in a panel about the movement to stop a police training center from being built in a forest south-east of the city, colloquially known as “Cop City”. The Atlanta Police Foundation, a private entity, is building the $109m training center with millions in corporate donations.
Donziger said activists involved in that movement have been “attacked because of this trend”, calling it “one of the most historic protest movements in American history”. State prosecutors have indicted 61 people under Georgia’s Rico law in connection with opposition to Cop City, making it the largest criminal-conspiracy case ever aimed at a protest movement.
“These are not just disparate events happening randomly,” Donziger said, referring again to “corporate power … weaponiz[ing] law”.
If Donziger were to receive a pardon, and could obtain his passport and law license, his plan is to “continue to assist my clients in Ecuador to remediate their ancestral lands”.
Donziger noted that other lawyers continue to work on the case – but, decades after oil was spilled, a complete clean-up hasn’t happened. As a result, he said, “there are high cancer rates and a lot of health problems, and some of their culture is decimated by the pollution”.
“Money is needed to clean up the pollution and restore access to the land,” he said. The case is about corporate accountability and climate justice, Donziger asserted. “Polluters cannot get away with offloading the costs of their pollution onto communities. Trying to get Chevron to pay for the cost of pollution – why is that so controversial?”
