Onder 6.2 Gerechtshof Den Haag 18 december 2015

Following this the Court of Appeal finds that in this stage of the appeal it cannot be established as certain that the hole in the pipeline resulted from sabotage, as described in the Joint Investigation Team report (hereinafter: the JIT report). The Court of Appeal considers that: (i) identifying sabotage as the cause of the damage has been controversial from the start; cf. the fact that not all those involved have signed the JIT report identifying the cause of the damage; (ii) that this JIT report has since been criticized by third parties as well, particularly as concerns the methods of investigation and reporting applied, which criticisms are apparently not easy to contest, not even with the aid of video footage/photographs as they do not prove conclusively that sabotage is the only possible cause of damage; (iii) that this concerns an old pipeline (from 1963) which, after SPDC had left Ogoniland for security reasons, had not been/could not be checked with regard to wall thickness/corrosion by means of intelligent pig runs, (iv) that Shell did not deny that there have been earlier spills and that their own inspections showed ‘that the remaining life of most of the SPDC Oil Trunklines is more or less non-existent or short, while some sections contain major risk and hazard’ and that ‘outright replacement is necessary because extensive corrosion [..]’ and (v) that in 2008 there has been another spill from the 24 inch pipeline in question, a few kilometres away near Bodo, due to a weld defect. It should be added that Milieudefensie et al. pointed out that it turns out from a Shell report from 2003 that the JIT investigations, more particularly their identifying sabotage as a cause of the spills, had been attracting criticism for some time already. On the basis of this it is not immediately clear why the quality of evidence relating to this matter was not paid more attention to.

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