For years, Chevron has repeatedly tried to distort Ecuadorian law, present misleading evidence, create fake laboratory test results, politicize the trial by lobbying Ecuadorian and U.S. government officials to extinguish the claims of the plaintiffs, and employ extrajudicial pressure to intimidate the judge and court personnel – all with the goal of preventing a final judgment from being reached.
These tactics help explain why the trial process has lasted 16 years and why Chevron’s lawyers have promised the plaintiffs a “lifetime of litigation” if they persist in their claims. Despite this
bad faith, Ecuador’s court system likely has
afforded Chevron more due process rights than any defendant in the history of civil jurisprudence. The company alone has presented more than 50,000 chemical sampling results and produced almost 200,000 pages of evidence in a trial that has lasted six years in its Ecuador phase. It has been free to inspect any site it wants, turn over any scientific evidence it can generate, present any witness from whom it wants testimony, and present any documentary evidence it can find.
It is the
scientific data itself that
is prov
ing the case against Chevron, not any bias on the part of the judge or court.
