A North Dakota judge has said he will order Greenpeace to pay damages expected to total $345m in connection with protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline from nearly a decade ago, a figure the environmental group contends it cannot pay.
In court papers filed Tuesday, Judge James Gion said he would sign an order requiring several Greenpeace entities to pay the judgment to pipeline company Energy Transfer. He set that amount at $345m last year in a decision that reduced a jury’s damages by about half, but his latest filing did not specify a final amount.
They caused damage to people. Why shouldn’t they have to pay?
Shell should have sued them for their lies about that defunct oil platform.
Like Labour, the utter destruction to the atomic level of Greenpeace is well overdue.
If people who engaged in a protest had to pay the full costs of those affected, it would certainly reduce these nuisances quite a bit!!!
I think that can be extended to strikes too. The transport unions (for example) should be liable for all the extra expenses of everyone trying to get to work when the train drivers are on strike.
Unions were found to be liable for employer losses from strikes in the 1901 Taff Vale railway case.
(amusingly what made it possible to sue them was the legal recognition given to unions in the 1871 Trade Union Act, which they had campaigned for)
However the unions were then given protection by the supposedly Liberal Campbell-Bannerman government, with the Trade Disputes Act 1906.
The constitutional lawyer Dicey said that this:
”makes a trade union a privileged body exempted from the ordinary law of the land. No such privileged body has ever before been deliberately created by an English Parliament”
Schumpeter said that it:
”resigned to the trade unions part of the authority of the state and granted to them a position of privilege“
If only those cases could be brought to the attention of the most powerful lawyer in the land. Mind you, he still push ahead with his Islamophobia Law, or Lord Alli would turn nasty…
For secondary picketing they already are.
I knew somebody who fully signed up to the social contract that you are willing to trade your freedom to make a political point by protesting, and that protest has no value if you have no costs to pay. She dismissed all the “how *DARE* you send me to prison for smashing stuff up, I was protesting!” morons.
a figure the environmental group contends it cannot pay.
In that case their directors should be held personally liable.
Are they not Limited Liability. What’s the deal?
Limited Liability does not protect from malfeasance , so perhaps the directors might be on the hook. I’ve been waiting for something like this. They might find themselves lawfared into penury.
Wind them up and sell the assets, then, like any other entity rendered bankrupt by its own actions.
“Are Greenpiss better or worse than Pals of the Planet?”
“For whom?”
Guardian running 4 months late. Story is from last fall.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/judge-orders-greenpeace-to-pay-345-million-in-pipeline-lawsuit-cutting-jury-amount-nearly-in-half