A North Dakota jury ordered Greenpeace in March to pay pipeline company Energy Transfer $667 million for the environmental group’s rogue campaign to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. [emphasis, links added]
Now, Greenpeace is trying to get a Dutch court to nullify the jury award, which the trial judge reduced to $345 million in October.
Energy Transfer is asking the North Dakota Supreme Court to block the activist group’s attempt to end-run the U.S. legal system.
If Greenpeace’s efforts succeed, they would harm much more than the pipeline company. They’d open the door for activists to torpedo other American critical infrastructure projects under European law.
The Dakota Access Pipeline saga started a decade ago when activists descended on North Dakota in hopes of halting the project.
During the monthslong standoff, reports spread of protesters shackling themselves to equipment, blowtorching parts of the pipeline, and hurling feces and burning logs at workers.
The chaos delayed the project, costing the parent company and partner entities an estimated $7.5 billion or more. The federal government was ordered to pay North Dakota $28 million in damages.
Kelcy Warren, then Energy Transfer’s CEO, didn’t take those losses sitting down. “What they did to us is wrong,” he said in 2017 of the environmental groups behind the demonstrations, “and they’re going to pay for it.”
Energy Transfer identified two U.S.-based Greenpeace entities and the umbrella group Greenpeace International as the ringleaders responsible for the pipeline fiasco.
During a three-week trial in March, the pipeline company presented evidence that Greenpeace personnel funded and trained protestors and even equipped them with lockboxes to chain themselves to pipeline equipment.
It also said that Greenpeace attempted to deprive the project of funding by falsely claiming the pipeline would encroach on tribal land. Greenpeace tried to distance itself from the violent conflict surrounding the pipeline.
But the group couldn’t take back a 2016 email from Greenpeace USA’s executive director stating that the organization provided “massive” support for the protests. The jury returned a nine-figure verdict, including $400 million in punitive damages.
Greenpeace had a Plan B, however. On the eve of the trial, Greenpeace International filed a new lawsuit with the District Court of Amsterdam, where the group is based.
The suit claims that Energy Transfer’s litigation violated Greenpeace International’s rights under the European Union’s 2024 anti-SLAPP law, an acronym for strategic litigation against public participation.
Greenpeace is asking a Dutch court to reassess the merits of the North Dakota case under Europe’s sweeping anti-SLAPP directive.
The law seeks to protect journalists and nonprofit organizations from meritless lawsuits designed to silence or intimidate them.
Greenpeace’s case isn’t an ordinary appeal, in which a party asks a higher court to review a lower court’s application of the law.
Rather, Greenpeace is asking a Dutch court to reassess the merits of the North Dakota case under Europe’s sweeping anti-SLAPP directive.
The case marks the first attempt to apply the law “extraterritorially” to stymie a lawsuit brought in a country outside the European Union.
If the European directive achieves this reach, it would extend the EU’s regulatory imperialism to the political and social spheres where Europe and America follow starkly different legal norms: In a nutshell, Europe’s speech rules are based on values, while America’s are based on rights.
The European law used by Greenpeace illustrates this contrast.
While 38 U.S. states and the District of Columbia have anti-SLAPP laws, these statutes are more targeted than those in Europe. They safeguard legally protected speech and lay out the process for dismissing suits targeting public discourse.
The EU law goes beyond protecting free speech rights. It gives European courts significant leeway to relitigate American cases when the result doesn’t conform to their values.
Under the EU directive, courts can award damages to parties that have been subjected to “abusive court proceedings,” including those involving “an imbalance of power between the parties” or “excessive” claims.
Read rest at WSJ
