The Ecuadorian plaintiffs suing Chevron Corp. were eerily quiet after Feb. 17. That’s when an intermediate appeals court in Ecuador appeared to give them the go-ahead to enforce the $18 billion oil-pollution verdict rendered by a local trial court judge, despite vivid accusations of fraud by Chevron. But the legal team for the indigenous plaintiffs had not lost their nerve or their funding. Apparently hoping to generate pressure for a settlement, they pounced on the day of Chevron’s annual meeting.
On May 30, the plaintiffs filed their long-awaited first enforcement action in Ontario. The business world’s most dramatic international dispute thus entered a fourth dimension, as proceedings continue in the courts of Ecuador and New York, and in the Netherlands before a panel supervised by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. The plaintiffs’ move to start collecting their award in another country was no surprise, but of the 30-odd nations with major Chevron assets, why did they choose to start collecting in Canada? And how will Chevron counter their moves on all of these chessboards? As a general matter, Canadian courts enforce foreign judgments readily. This may be partly because they are usually enforcing judgments from the United States, where adherence to the rule of law is rarely questioned. Canadian courts have so far developed only three common law defenses to enforcement fraud, natural justice (i.e., procedural fairness) and public policy.
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