United Nations Asked to Investigate $669 Million Trial Verdict Against Greenpeace In North Dakota Court

Independent Trial Monitors Express “Alarm” At Due Process Violations and Attacks on Free Speech and Indigenous Rights

New York, New York (April 23, 2025) – Attorneys and legal scholars monitoring the historic Energy Transfer v. Greenpeace trial in North Dakota have asked an independent United Nations human rights expert to investigate “flagrant and repeated” due process violations in the proceeding that resulted in an unprecedented $669 million verdict against the environmental organization.

The verdict handed down in March — the largest damages judgment ever against an environmental group — threatens the existence of Greenpeace and was designed by the pipeline company to weaken the right to protest and the climate movement as a whole, according to the monitors. Legal scholars consider the case a SLAPP harassment lawsuit designed to silence free speech.

In a letter addressed to  Margaret Satterthwaite, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, the monitoring committee stressed the “urgent, serious, and irreparable harm” that the verdict poses to free speech, human rights advocacy, and Indigenous sovereignty.

“It is our collective judgment that the exorbitant jury verdict against the Greenpeace entities … was the result of an unfair trial and sets a dangerous precedent for human rights,” the monitors wrote in the letter. “We believe the verdict poses a grave threat to free speech, the rule of law, judicial fairness, and Indigenous rights.”

The group asked Satterthwaite to treat the request “with urgency given the important legal protections that are threatened by the proceeding” and to conduct an in-country investigation and to issue a statement denouncing the use of SLAPP lawsuits as “incompatible” with the rights to due process and free speech.

Special Rapporteurs are independent experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council to monitor and report on human rights problems around the globe. Satterthwaite has served as a Rapporteur since 2022 and is widely respected for her work focusing on fair trial rights and judicial bias. “The case is not merely a local matter, but a globally significant test of the rule of law and the right of Indigenous Peoples to protect their lands, water, and culture,” said veteran human rights attorney and trial monitor Marty Garbus, who has represented Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel among other luminaries. “We are urging human rights experts all over the world to treat this as a priority case.”

The lawsuit against Greenpeace originally was brought eight years ago by the billionaire oil tycoon Kelcy Warren and his pipeline company Energy Transfer over supposed damages caused by construction delays to the Dakota Access Pipeline in modern-day North Dakota. The company built the 1,200-mile pipeline to transport oil from North Dakota to Illinois, where it would be transferred to barges and taken down the Mississippi River to the Gulf Coast for export to the world. As the pipeline was being built in 2016, historic Indigenous-led protests gathered over 100,000 people in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to protect the Tribe’s water, treaty lands, and cultural resources. Protestors were met with excessive force by law enforcement and private security forces that used dogs to attack protestors, among other tactics.

The pipeline ultimately was completed, but it has been beset by reports of leaks of toxic drilling fluids and is currently operating without proper permitting. There is ongoing litigation pending by the Standing Rock Sioux against the US government related to DAPL operations and permitting. Warren, the founder of Energy Transfer, has openly admitted the case against Greenpeace was meant to “send a message” to the protest movement; he also has said that climate activists “should be removed from the gene pool”.

Other members of the trial monitoring committee, who were in court each day of the 3-week trial, said they were “shocked” at what they witnessed.

“To say this case is problematic for the environmental and Indigenous rights movement is an understatement,” said Natali Segovia, an Indigenous attorney and the director of the Water Protector Legal Collective, one of the leading Indigenous rights organizations in the country. “It creates a legal record that distorts about what happened at Standing Rock and is an attempt to undermine the interests of the Tribe by using Greenpeace as a proxy.”

Steven Donziger, another trial monitor who was attacked by Chevron in a SLAPP lawsuit after helping Amazon communities win a landmark $10 billion legal case in Ecuador, said the case was part of an “abusive corporate playbook” designed to weaponize courts to silence advocacy. “Chevron used the playbook against me and the Amazon communities, and now Energy Transfer is using it against Greenpeace and the Standing Rock Sioux,” said Donziger, who noted that the same law firm (Gibson Dunn & Crutcher) was used by the industry for both cases.

“This is an urgent situation where the courts of North Dakota are allowing themselves to be instrumentalized by the fossil fuel industry to attack the climate movement and the right to protest,” said Donziger, who wrote an op-ed about the trial in The Guardian.

The Greenpeace trial has attracted global attention, with reports written about the proceedings by The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Guardian, and several other outlets. Greenpeace hopes to appeal the verdict, but if the court forces the group to post a bond — which could be as high as $25 million — it might lose its appellate rights and be forced to shut down its operations in the United States, which are the largest in the world.

Greenpeace has an international office in Amsterdam but has chapters in 25 countries.

The trial monitoring group used the letter to Satterthwaite to outline multiple problems with the trial, including jury bias against the environmental group; favoritism by the trial judge toward Energy Transfer; a campaign by Energy Transfer to taint the jury pool with online and print advertising; and a lack of public access to the proceedings. There was no livestream made available to the public and no public transcript of the proceedings.

Trial judge James D. Gion denied repeated motions by Greenpeace to transfer the case to a different venue where the group argued the right to a fair trial could be protected. The county where the trial was held has only 33,000 people and is heavily dependent on the fossil fuel industry, according to legal motions. Several jurors openly admitted they could not be fair, but they were seated anyway.

Greenpeace played almost no role in the Standing Rock protests and had only six members at the site for a few days, but the lawsuit named the group as the sole defendant and tried to claim it was responsible for all the supposed damages caused by any construction delays. Greenpeace said it engaged in peaceful protest and that in any event the so-called “damages” were either non-existent or purely speculative.

The trial monitors also include Jeanne Mirer, the President of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers; Kip Hale, a war crimes prosecutor; Scott Wilson Badenoch Jr., a Fellow with the American Bar Association; Jackie Dugard, a human rights scholar who teaches at Columbia University; Wade McMullen, a Distinguished Fellow at the Human Rights Institute at Georgetown Law School; Ayisha Siddiqa, a climate advocate and advisor to the UN Secretary General; Simon Taylor, co-founder of Global Witness; Paul Paz y Miño, Deputy Director of Amazon Watch; Terry Collingsworth, Founder and Executive Director of IRAdvocates; and Nadia Ahmad, Associate Professor at Barry University School of Law; For background on all of the trial monitors, see here.

More information can be found at trialmonitors.org.

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