A court in London will, today, deliver judgment in a case filed by lawyers for the Bodo community in Gokana Local Government Area of Rivers State.
The lawyers went to court in London to fend off what they said was an attempt by Shell to kill off their litigation.
The Ogoni community was devastated by two major oil spills a decade ago.
The Bodo oil spills have been the subject of years of legal wrangling.
In 2015, Shell accepted liability for the spills, agreeing to pay £55 million ($83million at the time) to Bodo villagers and to clean up their lands and waterways.
Lawyers for SPDC, the Nigerian arm of Shell, argued that the litigation should be struck off in October 2018, or at the latest a year later, and that it should only be re-activated if SPDC failed to comply with its obligation to pay for the clean-up.
But lawyers for the Bodo community argued that the SPDC position was unacceptable, because the clean-up could go wrong for any number of reasons, adding that under Shell’s proposal, the villagers would be left without the recourse of going back to court.
Speaking on the sidelines of the hearing, the lead lawyer for Bodo community, Dan Leader said, “The effect of what Shell is trying to do is to kill off the case.
“It’s only because of the pressure of litigation that the clean-up is getting back on track.”
However, Shell’s lawyers, citing an earlier judgment, compared the staid litigation to a “gun in the cupboard” that the Bodo community’s lawyers wanted to be able to hold to Shell’s head at their convenience, for years on end.
They said the litigation was a hindrance to the clean-up because it gave some local community members the impression that there was still the possibility of a bigger payout, incentivising them to block the clean-up rather than cooperate.