Major Australian oil and gas company Santos is deploying “scorched earth” tactics in contentious legal proceedings that could silence future opposition to the fossil fuel industry’s expansion plans in Australia.
The proceedings are the aftermath of Munkara v Santos, an unsuccessful attempt by a group of Tiwi Islanders to protect areas of claimed cultural significance for First Nations people from a new gas pipeline being constructed by Santos.
After winning the case earlier this year, Santos is now using the “world’s most-feared law firm” to pursue lawyers from the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO) and several Australian environment groups in a bid to recover its substantial legal costs. Santos’s legal actions could also expose the inner workings of Australia’s climate movement, putting activists personally at risk of retribution.
“It has aggressively targeted the Tiwi Islanders’ legal team, relentlessly seeking costs against them. These actions risk discouraging communities from using legal avenues to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their harmful practices.”
If successful, future efforts to hold fossil fuel companies accountable through the courts could be incapacitated. The ramifications include the potential to force any “third-party supporter” of unsuccessful climate litigation – such as donors, campaigners or environment groups that provide logistical or funding support – to pay the legal bills of fossil fuel defendants.
In January, Santos successfully defended a challenge to the Barossa Gas Export Pipeline that will transport gas from the Barossa gas field in the Timor Sea to a gas processing and export terminal at Middle Arm near Darwin.
— article by Michael Mazengarb in The Saturday Paper
