https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/5872002-north-dakota-court-rules-greenpeace/
BY JASON ISAAC,
The North Dakota Supreme Court just drew a bright line for the rule of law, U.S. sovereignty and the energy infrastructure that keeps our country running. On May 7, the court ruled four to one that Greenpeace International cannot use a Dutch court to nullify what a unanimous American jury already decided.
It is a welcome victory, but the fight against eco-lawfare is far from over.
The case began in 2019, when Energy Transfer sued Greenpeace and other activist groups over the coordinated, sometimes violent campaign waged against the Dakota Access Pipeline. After six years of litigation and a three-week trial, twelve North Dakota jurors unanimously found Greenpeace liable for conspiracy, defamation, defamation per se and tortious interference.
The damages exceeded $666 million across the three Greenpeace defendants, with more than $130 million tagged to Greenpeace International alone. The jury heard the evidence and reached its verdict. That should have been the end of it.
It was not. Two weeks before the North Dakota trial began, after six years of fighting in American courts, Greenpeace International filed a new lawsuit in Amsterdam. The plan was straightforward: ask a Dutch court to declare the North Dakota case “manifestly unfounded and abusive” under a new European Union anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) directive, then use that foreign declaration to erase the verdict and seize Energy Transfer’s assets wherever they could find them. It was a calculated end-run around our judiciary, dressed up in the polite language of European jurisprudence.
The North Dakota Supreme Court saw through it. Justice Jerod Tufte, writing for the majority this month, made the principle clear: Substance matters, not labels. A claim that requires a foreign court to find an American jury wrong is a collateral attack on that jury, no matter what name the lawyers attach to it.
The court ordered the trial judge to issue a narrowly tailored injunction blocking Greenpeace from pursuing the parts of its Dutch action that depend on relitigating what North Dakotans already decided.
The opinion is worth quoting on the point that matters most. Comity, the court wrote, “expires when the strong public policies of the forum are vitiated by the foreign act.” In plain English, foreign courts get respect when they earn it. A party that races to Amsterdam on the eve of an American trial to undermine the anticipated verdict cannot then demand that American courts politely defer to the foreign proceeding it manufactured.
