Exxon seeks delay of Indonesia case
on Dec 29, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Exxon Mobil Corp. and three affiliated companies, including a natural gas subsidiary in Indonesia, on Thursday asked Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., to order a delay in current District Court proceedings in a case that is also pending on the Supreme Court’s docket. The case is Exxon Mobil, et al., v. John Doe, et al. (Supreme Court docket 07-81), on which the Justices sought the views of the U.S. government on Nov. 13; the U.S. Solicitor General has not yet responded to that invitation. The case has not yet been scheduled for Conference.
The papers filed in the stay application (docket 07A546) were not available during this weekend. But it is apparent that they involve a ruling by Senior U.S. District Judge Louis F. Oberdorfer on Dec. 19, refusing to stay what the judge called “limited discovery.” The underlying case is a lawsuit by a group of villagers in Indonesia’s Aceh province, claiming that Exxon used soldiers of the Indonesian military to guard an Exxon natural gas plant in the province, and those soldiers engaged in atrocities against the villagers.
Exxon Mobil and its affiliates are seeking to delay any further proceedings in District Court until after the Supreme Court hears from the government, and then decides whether to hear the companies’ pending appeal.
But Judge Oberdorfer, in a decision Dec. 19 (in Doe, et al., v. Exxon Mobil, et al., docket 01-1357), noted that Exxon’s lawyers had told him in May 2006 that the U.S. and Indonesian governments were both “comfortable with” a process of limited discovery regarding the villagers’ legal claims.
In allowing some pre-trial evidence-gathering, Judge Oberdorfer had ruled that common law tort claims could go forward, but that he would exercise firm control over discovery, keeping it focused within the U.S. so as to avoid probing into Indonesian internal matters. The case as of now is scheduled to go to trial beginning next June 27. The villagers’ lawyers have said recently that only “a handful of depositions remain to be taken,” all of U.S. citizens living in the U.S. “Due to careful management by [the District] Court, there has been no discernable intrusion upon Indonesian sovereignty or impact on the interests of the United States,” they contended.
Judge Oberdorfer also noted this month in denying a stay that he and the D.C. Circuit had previously denied three prior stay requests by Exxon. While the fourth request was keyed to the specific incident of the Justices’ request for the government’s views on the pending Supreme Court case, the judge said that the oil company and its affiliates had not shown “irreparable injury” if limited discovery went ahead.
“There has been no change in the potential harm to [Exxon] since the Court of Appeals denied their last of three earlier stay requests; the only difference now is that the Supreme Court is interested in the Solicitor General’s views regarding the certiorari petition. Defendants cite no authority, nor has this court discovered any, supporting the apparent assertion that any burden threatened by ongoing discovery and trial proceedings would, ‘presto,’ escalate to the ‘irreparable’ category once a party simply moved to stay those proceedings by terming them ‘nonjusticiable.’ “ (Exxon claims that the lawsuit is barred by the “political question” doctrine.)
Moreover, Judge Oberdorfer said, in balancing the equities, that the “injuries and deaths of kin allegedly suffered” by the villagers, as well as the six-year time span of their lawsuit to date, are “plainly stronger” than any claim that Exxon has for harm from discovery.
While the Solicitor General has yet to tell the Supreme Court of the government’s current view of the lawsuit, the U.S. State Department did tell Judge Oberdorfer in July 2002 that “adjudication of this lawsuit would in fact risk a potentially serious adverse impact on significant interests of the United States, including interests related directly to the on-going struggle against international terrorism.”
(It is unclear, without having the stay papers at hand, whether Exxon has also been denied a stay by the D.C. Circuit, although that seems likely to have occurred. The Circuit Court, in a 2-1 ruling last January, decided that it had no jurisdiction over Exxon’s pre-trial appeal. That is the decision being challenged in Exxon’s pending petition at the Court.)
