Instead of facing testimony in a US federal court over the complicity its Nigerian subsidiary played in the 1995 executions of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni rights activists, Royal Dutch Shell made a US$15.5 million payout to the nine defendants – relatives of the martyrs – and the Ogoni people.

Shell’s announcement came at the outset of a federal court case in New York under the US’s Alien Tort Claims Act, an effective global instrument to bring social justice and payment damages to non-American victims of crimes or violations committed by companies. Shell said it would pay US$10.5 million to the defendants and US$5 million for an Ogoni trust fund.

Shell termed it a “humanitarian settlement” and proclaimed innocence over the 1995 complicity with the Abacha regime’s round-up and execution of the land and environmental rights activists, who were leading the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta.

The civil lawsuit in the US, brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights and EarthRights International, lingered on for well over a decade. One US writer, labour rights activist Phil Mattera, wrote, “It is understandable why the plaintiffs … would feel a need to settle a case that had dragged on for 13 years and provide some financial assistance to the Ogoni community. Yet it is frustrating to see Shell trying to turn an outrage into an opportunity to burnish its image.”

Shell was charged with crimes against humanity, and being complicit with arbitrary arrest, torture, jurisprudence negligence, wrongful death, and emotional distress. Saro-Wiwa and the others faced hasty trials and immediate execution by security forces of General Abacha in November 1995.