Court of Appeal Rules Against Shell On Multiple Pollution Case

A Court of Appeal has ruled in favour of Nigerian Communities over pollution by oil giant, Shell. The landmark judgement granted two communities whose environment has been devastated by oil pollution, victory on October 11, 2024.
It upturned an earlier high court ruling delivered in March which had made it almost impossible for affected communities to bring before Nigerian courts, claims seeking redress for multiple incidents of environmental pollution.
The claims judgment started nearly 10 years ago and will now move to a full trial with the disclosure of some important Shell documents, needed to back the petition.
More than 13,000 members of Bille and Ogale communities say each community has been subjected to about 100 oil spills from facilities belonging to Shell, a development that has devastated their land, waterways, and drinking sources, leaving them unable to continue with their traditional farming and fishing occupations.
The Court of Appeal dismissed the previous ruling that ruled that because the claimants were unable to link particular areas of damage to individual oil spills, their claims should be treated as a “Global Claim” – a type of legal action only ever used in contractual disputes in the construction industry.
Under a Global claim, the Bille and Ogale communities would have had to prove that Shell was responsible for 100 per cent of the pollution that has impacted their environment.
If there were any other sources of pollution for which Shell was not responsible, each individual’s claim would fail. Lawyers at Leigh Day, who represent the two communities, feared this would have made it practically impossible for people to bring environmental claims following repeated incidents of pollution in future, unless they could prove the same polluter was responsible for all the pollution that has impacted them.
The March 2024 High Court ruling required each of the 13,000 claimants to prove which specific oil spill or leak caused precisely what environmental damage at the start of the case, before any expert evidence or disclosure had been ordered.
The communities’ lawyers successfully argued that this imposed an impossibly high burden on claimants at the start of proceedings, when the petitioners were yet to have access to important Shell documents. All the claimants know, is that their waterways and drinking water became polluted over time, they cannot identify precisely which spill caused precisely what damage at such an early stage in the claim.
However, the Appeal Court ruling has removed that hurdle.