Civil rights lawyers, who accused Chevron Corp. of human rights abuses in Nigeria for a decade only to lose a jury verdict in December, now accuse the oil giant of trying to scare off future civil rights cases by seeking $485,000 in court costs from the Nigerians.
“Given the extreme poverty of the plaintiffs, of which Chevron is well aware, Chevron certainly cannot be operating under the impression that it will actually recover this huge sum from them,” wrote Cindy Cohn, attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, representing the plaintiffs.
