Donziger takes European stage with warning about corporate power & message of defiance

Human rights lawyer Steven Donziger returned to a European stage after nearly seven years of restricted international travel with a sweeping denunciation of corporate power, political repression and environmental destruction — but also an emphatic argument that ordinary people possess far more power than they realize.

Speaking July 23 at the Love Tomorrow Summit in Boom, Belgium, Donziger drew on his 33-year legal battle involving Chevron and Indigenous communities in Ecuador to argue that environmental destruction, attacks on activists, widening economic inequality and the erosion of democratic institutions are interconnected.

His central message was not one of despair.

“I am here to tell you that if we keep our goals clear and our focus strong, we can’t be stopped,” Donziger told the audience.

Introduced by artist and longtime supporter Ida Engberg, Donziger appeared on the Freedom Stage before thousands attending the thought-leadership event on the grounds of the Tomorrowland music festival. More than 7,000 people attended the fifth edition of the summit, organized around the theme “Natural Intelligence.”

For Donziger, the appearance carried special significance. He had participated in the summit by video in 2022 because his passport had been confiscated amid his legal battles in the United States.

“It’s a high honor to be here,” Donziger said. “I was here once before in 2022 via video because an oil company had my passport confiscated. I was not allowed to travel outside the United States for seven years.”

‘We have awesome power’

Donziger opened with a challenge to an audience gathered amid the culture, music and communal atmosphere surrounding Tomorrowland.

“We have awesome power. Look around this space and feel it,” he said. “I’ve learned over the course of my life that we have more power than we know.”

He argued that powerful political and economic interests devote enormous resources to persuading people that resistance is futile.

“They spend massive funds trying to convince us we have less power than we have,” Donziger said. “Trying to disconnect us from each other. Trying to demoralize us and even lock us up if we pose too much of a threat to their power.”

Even the celebration surrounding the summit, he argued, could have political meaning.

“Because dancing in the current environment — feeling joy — is not only fun but I believe is an act of political defiance,” he said.

That idea became the foundation of his address: Power is not simply something possessed by governments, corporations and billionaires. It also exists among ordinary people, particularly when they organize and act collectively.

“I’m going to talk about power,” Donziger said. “And how one of the worst sins in life is not to use the power you have — and to not leverage the power you have into more power, with the aim of making this world more just and safe for everyone.”

A 33-year battle

“My name is Steven Donziger,” he told the crowd. “I’m an attorney who has worked on one case for 33 years.”

That case began after Donziger traveled to Ecuador in 1993 and became involved in litigation over oil contamination in the Amazon.

Donziger described encountering communities living amid severe pollution and poverty.

“Cancer was everywhere. Doctors were virtually nowhere. People were dying,” he said.

According to Donziger, many of the people he met had little experience with the legal system and did not initially believe courts could offer them a meaningful avenue for justice.

“The people we talked to had never been in court in their lives. Had never met a lawyer. Did not think they had a right to walk into the local courthouse,” he said. “We convinced them otherwise.”

Litigation originally filed in New York was eventually moved to Ecuador after years of jurisdictional disputes. In 2011, an Ecuadorian court issued a multibillion-dollar judgment against Chevron. Chevron has long disputed the validity of that judgment and accused Donziger and others involved in the case of fraud and misconduct.

Donziger offered a starkly different account.

“I believe Chevron knew at that point that it could not win,” he said. “So they declared war on the communities and their lawyers through the legal system.”

Chevron later sued Donziger under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. A U.S. federal judge ruled against him in 2014, finding that the Ecuadorian judgment had been obtained through fraud and other misconduct. Donziger has vigorously disputed those findings.

His legal troubles eventually expanded beyond the underlying environmental litigation.

Donziger was charged with criminal contempt after refusing to comply with court orders, including an order involving electronic devices and records. After federal prosecutors declined to pursue the case, private attorneys were appointed to prosecute him. Donziger was convicted of six misdemeanor contempt charges in 2021 and sentenced to six months in prison.

He served part of the sentence in federal prison after having already spent an extended period in home detention.

‘The surveillance claw was attached to my body’

Donziger devoted some of his most personal remarks to describing what it was like to live under court-ordered electronic monitoring.

“I couldn’t ever take the GPS monitor off,” he said. “Slept with it. Showered with it. Ate with it. It would talk to me remotely. Wake me and my wife Laura up in the middle of the night to tell us to charge it.”

The experience, he said, affected his entire family.

“My son Matthew, who is here, spent the main part of his adolescence living with a detained Dad,” Donziger said.

He described the ankle monitor as a constant physical reminder of the power being exercised over him.

“The surveillance claw was attached to my body,” he said.

His detention became an international cause. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that his detention violated international law and called for his release and compensation. Nobel laureates, members of Congress, legal organizations and other supporters also rallied to his defense.

Donziger portrayed the case as an extraordinary example of a private corporation using the American legal system against an adversary.

“They ultimately took my passport, all of my money, and finally my freedom,” he said.

Chevron has maintained that Donziger’s prosecution resulted from his refusal to obey court orders, not from the company imprisoning him.

For Donziger, however, the distinction does not alter the broader lesson he draws from the experience.

“They tried to silence me,” he said. “They used me to try to intimidate activists and to undermine environmental advocacy.”

“They failed on all counts.”

A warning about repression

Donziger told the audience that his experience should not be viewed as an isolated legal dispute.

“I want to say something plainly, because plain language is what this moment requires,” he said.

He described his prosecution as “sort of the canary in the coal mine” for what he sees as an expanding campaign against activists across Western democracies.

“The oligarchs have declared war against the activists,” Donziger said.

He argued that governments and corporations increasingly use criminal prosecution, surveillance, economic pressure and other legal mechanisms against people challenging entrenched interests.

“The technique is classic: criminalize those who speak out,” Donziger said. “Shrink the civic space by scaring the hell out of people — so people stop speaking out.”

His criticism extended to surveillance technology. Donziger cited Pegasus spyware developed by Israel’s NSO Group, technology that has been used to target journalists, activists and political figures around the world.

He argued that modern surveillance can be particularly insidious because people voluntarily carry the technology that can potentially be used to monitor them.

“The propaganda and surveillance apparatus around us is so pervasive that we are already living inside Orwell’s ‘1984,’” Donziger said. “We just don’t call it that, because it isn’t hooded men and telescreens. It’s an app. It’s a terms-of-service agreement. It’s a camera you paid for yourself.”

Climate, Indigenous rights and corporate power

Donziger also placed his personal experience within the broader struggle over climate change and natural resources.

“The climate crisis is not a future threat anymore,” he said.

He accused governments and fossil fuel companies of continuing to expand oil and gas production despite worsening climate conditions and argued that Indigenous communities are disproportionately placed on the front lines of conflicts over resource extraction.

“The conflict between Indigenous rights and resource extraction is one of the fundamental battles of our generation,” Donziger said, arguing that Indigenous communities receive too little international support.

“These are the frontline defenders of the planet,” he said. “Their critical role and needs must be centered on all of our platforms.”

Underlying those conflicts, he argued, is an extraordinary concentration of economic power.

“Corporations have more unchecked power than at any point in history — power that is actively hollowing out our freedom and democracy from the inside,” Donziger said.

He also identified wealth inequality as a driving force behind environmental exploitation, war and political repression.

His argument was that these problems should not be understood independently: Concentrated wealth creates concentrated political power; concentrated political power can weaken democratic accountability; and weakened accountability allows environmental destruction and human rights abuses to continue.

“As corporate power grows, repression of progressive activists grows with it,” Donziger said. “And as popular movements grow stronger in response, the tools built to repress them grow stronger too.”

‘The law was never neutral’

Perhaps Donziger’s most provocative argument came when he turned to the institution in which he spent his career: the law.

“I need you to unlearn something you might have been taught in school: the concept of the law as neutral,” he said.

“It was never neutral,” Donziger argued. “It is, in practice, in every society I have seen … largely a tool that the powerful use to legitimize what they were going to do anyway.”

He said his experience changed his understanding of what lawyers and activists can reasonably expect courts to accomplish.

“I learned that lesson in a Manhattan courtroom with an ankle bracelet on my leg,” he said.

Yet Donziger did not tell his audience to abandon the law. Instead, he urged activists to recognize both its potential and its limitations.

“The law can be a genuine tool for justice — I’ve used it to win real victories for real people,” he said. “But it is not your savior, and it is not neutral, and it will not save you by itself.”

His prescription was pragmatic.

“Use it. Master it if you can. Never worship it,” Donziger said. “Understand its limitations.”

Legal action, he argued, works best as one part of a broader strategy involving organizing, communications, political action and public pressure.

‘History does not wait for consensus’

After spending much of his speech describing forces he considers dangerous, Donziger shifted toward the question at the heart of his address: What can an individual possibly do against institutions possessing vastly greater money, political influence and legal resources?

His answer began with organizing.

“One: leadership is about organizing movements. One person cannot do it alone,” Donziger said.

But collective action often begins with individual initiative, he added.

“One leader can ignite an entire social justice movement as long as they understand it’s about the movement,” he said.

Donziger invoked figures and movements ranging from Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela to climate activist Greta Thunberg.

“One person, willing to go first,” he said.

“History does not wait for consensus before it starts moving — it waits for someone willing to take the first step alone, and trust that others will follow.”

His third lesson followed naturally from the second: Do something.

“Take the first step and see what happens,” Donziger said. “Not the perfect plan. Not the fully formed strategy. Action.”

Movements rarely begin with certainty, he argued. They begin when somebody acts despite uncertainty.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step — and I want you to actually believe that, not just nod at it,” he said.

The inner life of an activist

Donziger then turned from political strategy to something more personal: how activists endure.

“Combine the inner spirit and the outer activism,” he said.

He acknowledged that anger had fueled him but said anger alone was insufficient to sustain a person through years of conflict.

“You cannot sustain years of confrontation with power on rage alone — I know, because I tried, and it nearly broke me,” Donziger said.

Instead, he called for pairing activism with an inner discipline capable of preserving a person’s humanity.

“You need the outer fire of activism and the inner discipline of peace, together,” he said. “Not instead of each other. Together.”

“One without the other burns you out or hollows you out. Both together is how you last long enough to actually win.”

Redefining victory

Donziger’s next lesson grew directly from his battle with Chevron: People confronting institutions with vastly greater resources may need to reconsider what victory looks like.

“Redefine what it means to win in an asymmetrical environment,” he said.

Victory, Donziger argued, does not necessarily require achieving every objective. Sometimes preventing a more powerful opponent from achieving its objective is itself a meaningful victory.

“A win is also when you stop the other side with its vastly superior resources from achieving theirs,” he said. “Or slow them down.”

He offered himself as an example.

“Chevron has still not gotten what it wanted from me — my silence, my surrender, my disappearance from this fight,” Donziger said.

“Every day I’m still standing here is a win, even on the days I haven’t gained an inch.”

His conclusion turned the ordeal he had described — litigation, electronic monitoring, imprisonment, financial devastation and years without international travel — into an argument against surrender.

“Don’t let anyone tell you that only total victory counts,” he said. “Denying them their victory counts too.”

‘The powerful are counting on your despair’

Looking across the crowd, Donziger acknowledged that the catalogue of problems he had described could itself become overwhelming.

“I know exactly what some of you are thinking: This is a lot to carry,” he said. “It is.”

But his final argument was that despair is not merely an emotional reaction. In his view, it can become an instrument of power when it convinces people that action is pointless.

“You are not carrying it alone, and you are not carrying it first,” Donziger said. “People have stood exactly where you’re standing, facing forces that looked exactly this immovable, and moved them anyway.”

Change, he said, did not occur because powerful institutions voluntarily corrected themselves.

“Because they refused to disappear,” he said.

After the speech, Donziger was joined onstage by his 20-year-old son, Matthew, who was 14 when his father’s home detention began.

According to Donziger, Matthew told him: “Dad, this has been one of the best days of my life. We’ve come full circle.”

For a lawyer whose passport had prevented him from appearing at the same gathering in person four years earlier, the moment underscored the message he had spent his speech trying to convey.

Donziger had come to Belgium with a story about what powerful institutions can do to an individual. He left his audience with an argument about what individuals, acting together, can do in return.

“The powerful are counting on your despair,” Donziger told them. “Don’t give it to them.”

“Protect your peace while you fight. Redefine winning on your own terms. Build your solidarity. Never, ever allow them to silence you.”

Then came the simplest instruction of his hourlong argument:

“Take that first step. And keep moving.”