Shell Oil Presses Supreme Court to Deprive Torture Victims of Justice - The case of Cali Samatar

[Jacaylbaro]

WASHINGTON-Will

victims of distant

genocides and

crimes against

humanity be

allowed to continue

using U. S. courts to

seek justice against

their persecutors,

as well as the

individuals and

corporations that

helped facilitate

human rights

violations across

the globe?

 

In a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, Shell

Oil is sending a shocking message: victims of

mass atrocities should have no standing in our

nation’s courts.

 

The case, Kiobel v. Shell, concerns a group of

Nigerian refugees living in the United States

who sued Shell for helping Nigeria’s former

dictator torture and kill environmentalists.

 

Rather than simply deny the allegations, Shell

is trying to deny the plaintiffs—and all victims

of foreign human rights crimes—the right to

seek justice in U.S. courts. Our courts, Shell

argues, are powerless to hear claims that a

foreign government slaughtered its own

people in its own territory—even when the

defendants who committed or financed these

crimes find refuge in this country.

 

For victims of human rights abuses, the stakes

couldn’t be higher. For decades, U.S. courts

have given survivors what repressive regimes

back home denied them: a chance to confront

their abusers, seek truth, and obtain a

measure of justice. I know because I am one

of these survivors.

 

As a young businessman in Somalia in the

early 1980s, I was tortured by the former

SiadBarre regime. Accused of treason for the

“crime” of volunteering in a civil society

group, I was bound by ropes in excruciating

positions, suffocated with water, and

electrocuted. I spent most of the next seven

years in solitary confinement in a small,

windowless cell.

 

After my release, the United States gave me

asylum. But it also gave me something that

victims could not dream of in Somalia—the

chance to bring my persecutor to justice. In

America, I discovered that General Mohamad

Ali Samantar—the former Somali Minister of

Defense who exercised command and control

over my torturers—was living in comfortable

retirement in a Virginia suburb.

 

My lawyers at the Center for Justice and

Accountability, a San Francisco-based human

rights organization, helped me and other

survivors bring a case against Samantar. In

2010, we fought all the way to the U.S.

Supreme Court—and won. Samantar was

denied immunity for his crimes, and in August

2012, a trial judge ordered him to pay $21

million to his victims. The judgment sent a

clear message: there will be no safe haven in

the United States for human rights abusers.

 

Our case against General Samantar is the

latest in a long line of precedents brought

under a 200 year-old law—the Alien Tort

Statute—that allows victims to sue in federal

court for violations of international law. In

2004, the Supreme Court upheld that law. But

now Shell is asking the Court to ignore that

precedent and roll back decades of progress in

human rights.

 

 

I fear that our case—which

has become a beacon for

ending impunity in

modern-day Somaliland—

will be the last of its kind.

 

Shell claims that human

rights do not belong in U.S.

courts. If the Court accepts

Shell’s arguments, U.S. law

will no longer give

survivors of foreign genocide, war crimes, or crimes against

humanity the right to hold perpetrators

accountable.

 

But Shell is wrong. Mass atrocities are the

business of our courts. International human

rights violations know no borders. Cases like

Samantaror Kiobel are not aboutdistant crimes

in far-away lands. They are almost always

about American lives. They are about the war

criminal next door, seeking to escape

responsibility for his past. They are about the

torture survivor whose business suit, doctor’s

coat, or factory uniform conceals her scars.

And they are about the rogue company whose

offices in America reap profits from abuses

overseas.

 

Shell’s lawyers are asking the Supreme Court

to shut the courthouse doors on these cases. I have faith that the Court will hold those doors

open. We must not avert our eyes to the

human rights abusers living among us and

deny victims their day in court.

 

BasheYousuf, a torture victim from Somalia,

was among plaintiffs who won a $21 million

lawsuit against his Somali torturer in Federal

Court.

 

 

 

 

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