Oil giant Shell will stand trial at the High Court in London from 10.30am Thursday 13 February to Friday 7 March 2025 over claims it is responsible for oil pollution which has devastated two Nigerian communities and breached their right to clean and healthy environment.
The trial is a key moment in the legal claim by the Ogale and Bille communities in the Niger Delta (combined population of 80,000), who have been fighting UK-based Shell plc and its Nigerian subsidiary SPDC for a clean-up and compensation since 2015. Each community has suffered from hundreds of spills, allegedly from Shell’s infrastructure, which has left them without clean water, unable to farm and fish and created serious risks to public health.
Neither community has had a proper clean up and both communities continue to live with chronic levels of pollution with no end in sight.
The case is set to proceed to a full trial in late 2026. If the villagers win, it will be the first time in legal history that a UK multinational will have been found to have breached a community’s human rights because of environmental pollution.
The February trial, to be heard by Mrs Justice May, is a ‘preliminary issues trial’ that will determine the scope of the legal issues to be heard at the full trial which will take place in 2026. It will consider, among other issues, two important issues that have wide implications for the future of all environmental claims:
Whether oil pollution by a private company can be a violation of the communities’ fundamental human rights under the Nigerian Constitution and African Charter on Human and People’s Rights. Importantly, fundamental human rights claims have no limitation period, meaning Shell would not be able to evade liability on the grounds the communities were unable to bring their claims within a narrow timeframe.
Whether Shell can be held liable for damage resulting from oil theft from pipelines, known as “bunkering,” or for the waste produced as a result of illegal artisanal refining of spilled or stolen oil. Shell blames much of the pollution in the Niger Delta on these activities, but the communities say Shell has repeatedly failed to take basic steps to prevent pollution caused by widespread oil theft.
Shell says it has no legal responsibility for the chronic pollution caused in the Niger Delta by its subsidiary, the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Ltd (SPDC) and has offered the Ogale and Bille communities no remedy or compensation.
Shell continues to try to sell off its onshore operations in Nigeria having made billions of pounds of profit over more than 70 years and without a clear plan for cleaning up the environmental devastation it has caused.
The Bille and Ogale communities are represented by in the trial by Leigh Day international team partners Daniel Leader and Matthew Renshaw who have instructed Fountain Court’s Anneliese Day KC, Matrix’s Phillipa Kaufmann KC, Anirudh Mathur and Catherine Arnold, 2 Temple Gardens’ Alistair McKenzie and Blackstone’s George Molyneaux.
Representatives of the Bille and Ogale communities, King Okpabi and Chief Bennett, will attend the trial and are available for interviews on the effect the oil pollution has had on their communities. King Okpabi will be available for interviews outside the High Court on the first day of the trial, before the hearing begins.
Notes
Since a Supreme Court ruling in 2021, Leigh Day has been preparing for the trial on behalf of the two communities as well as the thousands of individuals the firm represents. Shell has served its legal Defence, arguing that it has no legal responsibility for any of the pollution.
Regardless of the Court’s decision on these preliminary issues, there will be a full trial of the Bille individual claims (and likely the Bille Community claim) in late 2026. The parties have agreed a case management order which sets out the next steps leading up to the 2026 trial, including two further case management conferences, the identification of lead claimants, standard disclosure of documents all by late 2025.
The Ogale and Bille communities in the Niger Delta (estimated combined population of 80,000) have been fighting for justice against the British oil and gas giant, Shell plc, for ten years. They simply seek to ensure that the oil pollution which has devastated their communities is cleaned up to international standards (which Shell concedes they are legally obliged to do) and that compensation is provided for their loss of livelihoods and the destruction of their way of life, given that these rural communities’ ability to farm and fish has been largely destroyed.
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On 12 February 2021, the UK Supreme Court unanimously ruled that there was a “good arguable case” that Shell plc, the UK parent company, was legally responsible for the pollution caused by its Nigerian subsidiary and that the case would proceed in the English courts. The judgment represented a watershed moment in the fight for corporate accountability. The Supreme Court confirmed in both Okpabi v Shell and its earlier 2019 decision in Lungowe v Vedanta (environmental pollution from a Zambian copper mine) that parent companies of multinational companies in the UK can be held legally responsible for harms committed by their foreign subsidiaries, and the scope of that potential liability is much wider than previously understood.
Shell has shown no interest in providing remedy to the Ogale and Bille communities at a time when they are making unprecedented global profits ($40 billion in 2022). The case is proceeding to trial to determine whether Shell’s parent company in London, as well as its Nigerian subsidiary, are legally responsible for the harm caused to the communities in Nigeria.
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Publish date : 2025-02-06 12:16:36
