Press Releases

WASHINGTON—Today, 34 Members of Congress, led by Ranking Member of the House Rules Committee James P. McGovern (D-MA), and including Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Ranking Member of the House Committee on Small Business Nydia M. Velázquez (D-NY), and Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), sent a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to pardon Steven Donziger, an environmental and human rights lawyer whose persecution has been widely criticized by human rights organizations, legal scholars, and the UN Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

Between 1964 and 1992, Texaco—later acquired by Chevron—dumped 16 billion gallons of toxic oil waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon. Multiple court decisions in Ecuador, including by the country's highest court, found the dumping caused immeasurable harm to the Indigenous communities and farmers who live there. Chevron’s contamination poisoned water supplies, destroyed livelihoods, and left entire communities plagued by cancer and other life-threatening illnesses. In short, motivated by a desire to maximize revenues, Chevron and its executives deliberately chose to decimate one of the world’s most fragile and irreplaceable ecosystems.

In response, Mr. Donziger, a renowned environmental and human rights lawyer, led a legal team to seek justice on behalf of those who has been impacted. The resulting $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron—the largest ever of its kind—was unanimously upheld by Ecuador’s Supreme Court, and later affirmed by Canada’s Supreme Court for enforcement purposes. Yet Chevron still has refused to pay, choosing instead to undermine the rule of law and target Mr. Donziger in a campaign of relentless retaliation designed to silence and intimidate him and others who work for truth and justice.

In today’s letter, the lawmakers detailed the lengths to which Chevron and its allies have gone to manipulate the U.S. legal system to attack Mr. Donziger:

• Chevron spent billions going after Mr. Donziger, securing an unprecedented court order demanding that he turn over confidential case files in violation of attorney-client privilege.
• After he appealed this unprecedented order, Mr. Donziger was charged with criminal contempt of court.
• After the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute such a bizarre charge, a district court in New York made the alarming decision to appoint a private corporate law firm to step into the shoes of the U.S. government to prosecute and detain Mr. Donziger for over two years. The law firm never disclosed that Chevron had been a recent client of the firm.
• Mr. Donziger was denied a jury trial, disbarred without a fact hearing, and spent 993 days in home detention with a GPS bracelet attached to his leg—a period of detention four times longer than the maximum allowed for the contempt charge.

“Mr. Donziger is the only lawyer in U.S. history to be subject to any period of detention on a misdemeanor contempt of court charge. We believe that the legal case against Mr. Donziger, as well as the excessively harsh nature of the punishment against him, are directly tied to his prior work against Chevron. We do not make this accusation lightly or without evidentiary support,” write the lawmakers in their letter to President Biden.

The lawmakers also underscore the broader implications of this case, calling it a dangerous precedent for all lawyers, environmental advocates, and human rights defenders.

“Notwithstanding the personal hardship this unprecedented legal process has imposed on Mr. Donziger and his family, we are deeply concerned about the chilling effect this case will have on all advocates working on behalf of other frontline communities, victims of human rights violations, and those seeking environmental justice. Those who try to help vulnerable communities will feel as though tactics of intimidation—at the hands of powerful corporate interests, and, most troublingly, the U.S. courts—can succeed in stifling robust legal representation when it is needed most. This is a dangerous signal to send,” the letter states.

Chevron's targeting of Mr. Donziger has been widely condemned by human rights organizations, international legal experts, 68 Nobel Prize Laureates, Amnesty International, and members of the European Parliament.

In September 2021, the UN Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Mr. Donziger’s extended pre-trial detention was arbitrary under international human rights standards and therefore unlawful. The Working Group identified several violations of norms relating to the right to a fair trial and the impartiality of the legal system, and ordered the U.S. government to release him.

“Pardoning Mr. Donziger,” conclude the lawmakers in their letter to President Biden, would send “a powerful message to the world that billion-dollar corporations cannot act with impunity against lawyers and their clients who defend the public interest.”

The signed letter is available here as a PDF.

In addition to McGovern, the letter was signed by: Senators Bernard Sanders (I-VT) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and Representatives Nanette Barragán (CA-44), Donald Beyer (VA-08), Cori Bush (MO-01), Greg Casar (TX-35), Steve Cohen (TN-09), Mark DeSaulnier (CA-10), Lloyd Doggett (TX -37), Veronica Escobar (TX-16), Maxwell Frost (FL-10), Jesús García (IL-04), Raúl Grijalva (AZ-07), Jared Huffman (CA-02), Pramila Jayapal (WA-07), Daniel Kildee (MI-08), Barbara Lee (CA-13), Summer Lee (PA-12), Teresa Leger Fernandez (NM-03), Ted Lieu (CA-36), Seth Magaziner (RI-02), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14), Ilhan Omar (MN-05), Mark Pocan (WI-02), Ayanna Pressley (MA-07), Jamie Raskin (MD-08), Janice Schakowsky (IL-09), Terri Sewell (AL-07), Mark Takano (CA-39), Mike Thompson (CA-04), Rashida Tlaib (MI-12), Juan Vargas (CA-52), and Nydia Velázquez (NY-07).