The Irrawaddy

December 10, 2003—A trial pitting Burmese villagers against US-based oil giant Unocal Corporation began in California on Tuesday. Unocal is the first American company to stand trial in a US court for alleged human rights violations committed abroad.

The California Superior Court in Los Angeles began hearing claims that 13 Burmese villagers were beaten, tortured and forced to provide free labor by Burmese army troops which provided security for a gas pipeline project in southern Burma.

"Burmese soldiers enforced a system of slave labor and committed horrible acts of violence on Unocal’s behalf," said Terry Collinsworth, a plaintiff’s lawyer and executive director of the International Labor Rights Fund.

Unocal faces court action under the 200-year-old Alien Tort Claims Act, which allows foreign nationals to sue in US courts for human rights abuses. Unocal is one of at least a dozen US corporations that have been sued in American courts for alleged abuses which took place overseas, but its case is the first to reach trial.

Dan Stormer, a Los Angeles attorney representing the Burmese villagers, said, "We are using the American justice system to hold corporations liable for their conduct in foreign countries."

Unocal claims that it is not liable for the alleged abuses because its venture in Burma did not involve the parent company, only foreign-based subsidiaries. A Unocal statement about the case says the lawsuit "seeks to hold us ‘vicariously liable’ for the actions of the armed forces of a sovereign nation" and calls the company a "minority investor in the pipeline and not the operator."

Stormer counters that the plaintiffs argue that the foreign subsidiaries in question were controlled entirely by Unocal and didn’t have a single employee. "These are phony corporations created solely to hide from liability," he said.

The trial’s first phase, which began yesterday, will determine if the subsidiaries are separate corporate entities or merely "alter egos" of Unocal.

Unocal is a international energy corporation based in El Segundo, California which operates the $1.2 billion pipeline in partnership with Thailand’s PTT Exploration & Production, Myanmar Oil & Gas Enterprise—Burma’s state-owned oil company—and France’s TotalFinaElf. The 409-km pipeline between the Andaman Sea and Thailand was completed in early 1998.

Although the US prohibited new investments in Burma in 1997, Unocal was exempted from sanctions because it had begun doing business there several years earlier.