Defense lawyers for Exxon Mobil urged a federal judge today to dismiss a longstanding suit by Indonesian villagers who have accused the company of abetting human rights abuses in their country.
Appearing before Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, defense counsel Alex Oh argued that continuing the case would interfere with U.S. foreign policy goals in a politically fragile region. Investigating claims that soldiers hired by Exxon shot, abducted and raped civilians could upend a delicate peace process in Indonesia, which is recovering from a civil war, she said.
The Indonesian government has objected to lawyers doing any discovery in Indonesia, noted Oh, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
“This court will inevitably have to hear evidence about what Indonesian troops did to Indonesian citizens during and Indonesian civil war” if the case were to go forward, Oh said.
Exxon hired Indonesian soldiers to protect a natural gas processing plant in the war-torn region of Aceh, the center of a decades-long battle between Muslim separatists and the national government. The lawsuit alleges that the soldiers terrorized the local population while working for Exxon.
Senior Judge Louis Oberdorfer, who originally oversaw the case, dismissed several claims brought by the villagers under the Alien Tort Claims Act, reasoning that they ventured too far into political questions. He narrowed the suit to state-law tort claims, including wrongful death allegations.
But Exxon’s lawyers argued today that even the narrower case will inevitably spill into political issues such as the conduct of Indonesia’s entire military during the conflict. They also said that Indonesia’s current president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, would be dragged into the suit, because he was the country’s minister of mines and energy at the time of the alleged atrocities. The suit is “‘about the present president’s conduct as head of the ministry,” Oh said.
Lawyers for the villagers disagreed, arguing they can keep their investigations “very narrow” by tailoring them to Exxon’s involvement with the soldiers. “In our view, it’s a police brutality suit, and I’ve never heard of one of those where you get to depose the president of the United States,” said Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll partner Agnieszka Fryszman.
Fryszman also contended that the U.S. State Department, which asked the court to dismiss the Alien Torts Claims Act counts, never objected to letting the case go forward under state law.
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