#RITA GLAVIN BIO TRIAL#

Things quickly changed when the trial began in 2003 and we started to submit thousands of soil and water samples from company drilling sites that showed elevated and even life-threatening levels of toxins. federal court (where our case was originally filed) attesting to the fairness of Ecuador’s courts in an effort to move the matter to a jurisdiction where it thought it could engineer a politically-motivated dismissal. The company had filed 14 sworn affidavits in U.S. Chevron simply could not take the truth.Ĭhevron had accepted jurisdiction in Ecuador and insisted the trial be held in the country where it dumped toxic waste for decades with legal impunity. It should be this way: evidence proved Chevron deliberately dumped 16 billion gallons of cancer-causing oil waste into the rainforest, causing a massive health crisis, escalating rates of childhood leukemia, and thousands of deaths.īut then things got really bizarre. Never before have Indigenous peoples vanquished a major oil company to this degree. It has been affirmed for enforcement purposes by multiple appellate courts, including the Supreme Courts of Ecuador and Canada.

In 2011, our team of Indigenous leaders and lawyers won an epic $9.5 billion environmental legal case against Chevron in Ecuador.

Many of you know me as the US lawyer who has spent much of the last 28 years fighting Chevron and the fossil industry on behalf of Indigenous peoples over the destruction of the Amazon and our larger planet.

Rita glavin bio