Those are the damages that a court expert in Ecuador has recommended that Chevron Corporation pay for polluting the Amazon. (In Ruggie’s world, human rights include environmental protection.) Unfortunately, two days later, the presiding judge in the Chevron case was caught on tape—predicting the result of the case, according to one interpretation. In a moment, that $27 billion became a potential embarrassment for the corporate human rights movement.
If $27 billion is just a corrupt joke, argues John Knox, a professor at Wake Forest University School of Law, then it’s “bad news for anyone hoping that courts in developing countries can take on these kinds of massive environmental or human rights problems.”
