> As Chevron’s vendetta continued, international outrage grew. Just before sentencing, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued an opinion i

> As Chevron’s vendetta continued, international outrage grew. Just before sentencing, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued an opinion in Donziger’s favor, ruling that his two years of house arrest was illegal under international law and that he had been denied the right to a fair trial. A panel of five prominent jurists called that confinement “arbitrary” and said that both judges, Kaplan and Preska, had shown “a staggering lack of objectivity and impartiality.” In court, Preska briefly acknowledged the UN findings only to dismiss them. > [...] > Only a corporation like Chevron worth billions could have financed such a prosecution. The oil giant paid for a disgraced former judge named Alberto Guerra and his family to move to the United States. Chevron’s lawyers rehearsed Guerra’s testimony with him 53 times before he went on the witness stand, where Guerra claimed that Donziger and an Ecuadorian lawyer had offered him a $500,000 bribe and that the pair had ghostwritten the final judgment against Chevron. Donziger and his defense team estimate that Chevron has spent $2 billion on legal fees and other costs. https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/steven-donziger-chevron-sentencing/ https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/steven-donzige... > In 2014, U.S federal judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled that the Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron "was the product of fraud." Guerra—who received cash and benefits from Chevron totaling $2 million, according to Donziger—later admitted he lied about the bribery, but the case continued. https://nacla.org/news/2021/08/25/ecuador-chevron-donziger https://nacla.org/news/2021/08/25/ecuador-chevron-donziger The expert testimony that Donziger supposedly ghostwrote wasn't considered in the Ecuadorian ruling anyway, and the judge he supposedly bribed wasn't even on the case when Donziger supposedly bribed him I don't think it makes sense to look at Chevron's accusations and say 'ah, yes, both sides', or to look at the extreme strangeness of this whole process in American courts and then take at face value the judgments of courts of countries aligned with the US (especially other countries in the Americas) and/or US energy interests. The US got a whole lot of countries to line up behind totally baseless accusations of electoral fraud in Bolivia in 2019, too.