Biography
Steven Robert Donziger is an American environmental and human-rights lawyer who represented Indigenous peoples and rural communities affected by oil contamination in Ecuador’s Amazon region. Beginning in 1993 he participated in litigation alleging that Texaco — acquired by Chevron in 2001 — had discharged billions of gallons of oil-production waste into local lands and waterways, and in 2011 an Ecuadorian court found Chevron liable, imposing a cleanup and damages judgment eventually reduced to approximately $9.5 billion. Chevron answered with civil racketeering litigation in federal court in New York, which found the Ecuadorian judgment had been procured through fraud and entered injunctions and discovery orders against Donziger; he disputed those findings and resisted several orders, arguing in part that surrendering his electronic devices would expose privileged information belonging to his Ecuadorian clients. Charged with six misdemeanor counts of criminal contempt, he was placed under GPS-monitored home confinement on August 6, 2019, and after the U.S. Attorney declined to prosecute, the court appointed private special prosecutors. He was found guilty at a bench trial on July 26, 2021 and sentenced on October 1 to six months’ imprisonment. He entered FCI Danbury on October 27, 2021, was transferred to home confinement on December 9 after approximately six weeks in prison, and completed his sentence on April 25, 2022 — 993 continuous days under court-ordered restraint in all, counting the pretrial restrictions, the imprisonment and the sentence-related home confinement. Amnesty International and the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention criticized the proceedings and called his detention arbitrary.
