A case that has taken 12 years to go to trial in court, lawyers for four Nigerian farmers accused a multinational oil company Shell of polluting the Niger Delta at The Hague Appeals court. It happened on Thursday. The four farmers (two have since died), are demanding compensation and cleaning up the catastrophic oil spills that ruined their three fishing villages on the banks of the Niger Delta, causing disease and preventing them from fishing.
Shell, an Anglo-Dutch company, tried to prevent the case from being heard in the Netherlands, but in 2015, judges ruled that the case should go ahead. The farmers and their relatives, who are backed by Dutch environment group Milieudefensie, watched the court proceedings via video link from Nigeria. “This has been a long-running case and you are aware of the subsequent problems as a result of the oil pollution in the Niger Delta,” lawyer Channa Samkalden told the three-judge panel, adding, “a solution still seems a long way off.”
Data source: All Africa news
