I spent years of my life keeping up with all the twists and turns of the Chevron/Ecuador case. There are nearly 400 Lago Agrio-related posts here at Letters Blogatory! But since the US Supreme Court denied Steven Donziger’s petition for review of his conviction for contempt of court in 2023, I’ve more or less lost track of what’s left. Aside from a post critiquing the always-ripe-for-critique Amnesty for its call for President Biden to pardon Donziger as he left office (“Donziger and Post-Truth Politics“), I’ve written nothing about the case.

A reader called to my attention the arbitral tribunal’s recent award in “Track III” of the long-running investment treaty arbitration between Chevron and Ecuador, which awarded Chevron more than $200 million in damages. Apparently both sides found something to like. Chevron said it welcomed the decision as a victory for the rule of law. The Ecuadoran government’s press release points out that Chevron only received a small fraction of the damages it had claimed. Amazon Watch, with which Pablo Fajardo is apparently associated, denounced “international arbitration systems” as “tools used to dismantle human rights protections” and announced it was asking an Ecuadoran judge to “immediately order the seizure of” the amount due to be paid to Chevron, apparently in order to redirect the funds to the plaintiffs in the underlying Ecuadoran case instead. Steven Donziger’s substack, Donziger on Justice, is silent. His most recent article not about himself is titled: “UPDATE: Israel has killed 500,000 people in Gaza. That’s 24% of the population.” Yikes.

The tribunal had already decided the main substantive issues in the case. The Lago Agrio judgment, it found, was a fraud. Ecuador had an obligation to make the judgment unenforceable (in whatever way it chose to do so under Ecuadoran law). And so a lot of the fire and brimstone that advocates have directed at the new award is a few years too late. If the Lago Agrio judgment is a fraud and if Chevron was denied fair treatment, then of course there’s going to be a remedy for that. With that in mind, the award is more than a thousand pages long, and I am not going to go through the details about which items of damage the tribunal decided to award and which it decided not to award in detail.

Ecuador can, and given how things have gone so far, it likely will, seek to have the award set aside in the Dutch courts. So this may not be the final word about Ecuador’s liability to Chevron. See you in a few years!