Amnesty, Greenpeace Among 50 Groups Demanding President Biden Grant Pardon
Steven Donziger was arbitrarily detained by Chevron in retaliation for winning a landmark pollution judgement. The movement for his pardon is growing.
I'm deeply moved that 50 prominent human rights and environmental organizations yesterday submitted an extremely detailed and thoughtful letter to the White House supporting my request that President Biden pardon me immediately. The groups are from the US and several other countries and include Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Amazon Watch, Climate Defiance and the Sunrise Movement.
U.S. Representative Jim McGovern, one of the leading human rights advocates in the Congress, also has backed the letter. He said:
"This is about more than a court case. It's about sending a message that corporate polluters need to be held accountable for breaking the law and that they shouldn't be allowed to harass and intimidate those who seek justice. The truth is that it's the executives at Chevron, not Steven Donziger, who should have been out on trial."
As the 50 NGOs wrote in their letter to President Biden: “Granting a pardon to Mr. Donziger would achieve three key government objectives: it would assert the executive branch's intolerance for judicial overreach in prosecutorial discretion, especially in cases influenced by corporate interests against human rights defenders. It would reinforce the U.S. commitment to international human rights standards and signal support to environmental and human rights advocates by rejecting the precedent of private corporate prosecutions. This action would also uphold justice by rectifying the arbitrary mistreatment of Mr. Donziger, demonstrating that corporations cannot misuse the judicial system to criminalize legitimate human rights activism, particularly amid the global climate crisis.”
You can read the entire letter by clicking here.
The legal basis for the pardon is simple: my entire contempt prosecution by a private Chevron law firm was unconstitutional (according to two Supreme Court justices) and a violation of international law, according to a ruling from five UN jurists. The UN found an "appalling" level of bias against me by a pro-corporate judge in New York who had financial ties to Chevron. In my view, his criminal contempt charges against me were baseless and a clear attempt to destroy my career in retaliation for helping Amazon communities win a landmark $10b pollution judgment against the oil company. The charges were rejected by the federal prosecutor which prompted the judge to allow Chevron to prosecute me directly in the name of the government. The judge ended up forcing me to spend almost three years in detention on a misdemeanor that had a maxium sentence of six months.
Given that I have exhausted my legal options in the US, President Biden is now my "court" of last resort. A pardon will help me travel out of the country to do human rights work (Chevron had my passport confiscated), work as a lawyer, and help my clients in Ecuador who I have not seen for five years. It is also a major test for President Biden's commitment to human rights, the rule of law, and climate justice.
We must stop the increasing "criminalization" of human rights lawyers and advocates. One important way to do that is for the President to issue the pardon now.
You most definitely deserve to be pardoned. Not only that, but action should be taken against Chevron for illegally going after you. And steps must be taken to assure that no one in the future goes through what you have in similar circumstances.
PARDON?
well pardon me, since when do we "pardon" those whose work is exemplary. We award those who work for the welfare of humanity, or at least that is what we claim to do in this country. This case against you is beyond crazy, it is fully illegal.