Amnesty International warned against a “chilling verdict” returned by a North Dakota jury on Thursday in a lawsuit against Greenpeace. The verdict orders Greenpeace, an environmental advocacy organization, to pay Energy Transfer, a fossil fuel company, $660 million US in defamation liability.

Amnesty International described the jury’s verdict as “chilling” according to its “severe implications for Indigenous Peoples, and other environmental defenders and climate activists.” Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, explained, “This devestating verdict sets an array of deeply damaging precedents on the rights to freedom of speech, association and peaceful protest and puts the very future of Greenpeace at risk.”

Energy Transfer, the plaintiffs, brought a complaint against Greenpeace, the defendants, in March 2019, alleging Greenpeace caused “financial harm to Energy Transfer, physical harm to its employees and infrastructure” and wanted to “disrupt and prevent” the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Energy Transfer aimed to recover “millions of dollars of damages” due to Greenpeace’s alleged conduct.

Energy Transfer’s complaint arose from Greenpeace’s alleged involvement in demonstrations against the DAPL. The DAPL is a “1,1172-mile underground oil pipeline” that transports oil from the “Bakken region in North Dakota, across South Dakota and Iowa, to Patoka, Illinois.” The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is an Indigenous nation that has a reserve on the border of  North and South Dakota. However, Energy Transfer argues the DAPL does not cross any land or water owned by the Indigenous nation.

Energy Transfer specifically alleges that towards the end of the pipeline’s completion in 2016, Greenpeace organized protests to “obstruct construction of DAPL” and distributed “defamatory falsehoods regarding DAPL’s” intrusion on the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s sacred burial sites and water supplies. In March 2024, Greenpeace released a statement criticizing Energy Transfer’s lawsuit, in particular, because it attempts to “erase the Indigenous leadership” behind the protests. The statement goes on to explain how Greenpeace did not direct the movement, rather, “Native activists living on the frontlines of fossil fuel expansion” did.

Regarding the jury’s verdict, Greenpeace International General Counsel Kristin Casper made a statement promising the organization will continue to defend against Energy Transfer’s lawsuit:

Energy Transfer hasn’t heard the last of us in this fight. We’re just getting started with our anti-SLAPP lawsuit against Energy Transfer’s attacks on free speech and peaceful protest. We will see Energy Transfer in court this July in the Netherlands. We will not back down. We will not be silenced.

A similar demonstration against a pipeline project took place north of the border in Canada by the Wet’suwet’en First Nation in British Columbia from 2019 to 2023.  The Coastal GasLink is a pipeline project that began construction in British Columbia on the ancestral, unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en. Amnesty International released a report in December 2023 arguing the Canadian government violated the human rights of the Wet’suwet’en protestors.