Katharine "Katie" Redford (born March 7, 1968) is an American human rights lawyer and activist who is credited with spearheading a movement to hold international companies accountable for overseas abuse in their home court jurisdictions, and in doing so, opened up new possibilities in human rights law. Along with her husband, human rights activist Ka Hsaw Wa from Burma/Myanmmar, she is the co-founder of EarthRights International, a non-profit group of activists, organizers, and lawyers with expertise in human rights, the environment, and corporate/government accountability. She left EarthRights in 2019 after 25 years to lead the newly founded Equation Campaign, a ten-year funding initiative working to bring about a safe future by enhancing the power of movements to keep oil and gas in the ground.
Redford is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law (UVA), where she received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Human Rights and Public Service. She is a member of the Massachusetts State Bar and served as counsel to plaintiffs in EarthRights's landmark case Doe v. Unocal. Redford received an Echoing Green Fellowship [1] in 1995 to establish EarthRights, and helped build the organization to a global institution with offices in Burma, Thailand, Peru and Washington, D.C. In addition to working on EarthRight's litigation and teaching at the EarthRights Schools, Redford has served as an adjunct professor of law at both UVA [2] and the Washington College of Law at American University. [3] She has published on various issues associated with human rights and corporate accountability, in addition to co-authoring ERI reports such as In Our Court, Shock and Law, and Total Denial Continues. In 2006, Redford was selected as an Ashoka Global Fellow. [4]
Human rights law
Redford introduced a simple and powerful idea into the human rights movement: that corporations can be brought to court for their role in overseas abuse. While American and European courts have customarily declined to hear cases where abuses have occurred outside their jurisdiction, Redford and her team at EarthRights International (ERI) broke their reluctance by uncovering legal tools and strategies that overcome the barrier of jurisdiction.
In 1994 Redford turned in a law school paper suggesting the use of an ancient federal statute to fight human rights abuses in Burma, The Alien Torts Claims Act. The act dates back to 1789, when George Washington signed the fledgling nation's first Judiciary Act. An obscure provision in it appears to give foreigners the right to sue in federal court over violations of international law. Though the act has been used to sue individuals, it has never been used successfully to sue a corporation for human rights abuses. Her professor gave her an A but warned that such a case would never occur. That student paper, "Using the Alien Torts Claims Act: Unocal v. Burma," became the basis of the groundbreaking case John Doe I, et al. v. Unocal Corp., et al. In March 1997 it became the first case in which jurisdiction was granted over a corporation for human rights abuses overseas. Unocal eventually settled the case out of court. [5]
In 1995 Redford received seed money from Echoing Green [1] to launch EarthRights International (ERI) with Tyler Giannini and Ka Hsaw Wa. EarthRights began its work with offices in Thailand and Washington, D.C., as a nonprofit organization that works at the intersection of human rights and the environment—which it defines as "earth rights"—by documenting abuses, mounting legal actions against the perpetrators of earth rights abuses, providing training for grassroots and community leaders, and launching advocacy campaigns.
EarthRights brought the case of John Doe I, et al. v. Unocal Corp., et al., to both state and federal courts in California. Most legal experts believed the case would never fly and at first it appeared they may be right. But seeing possibilities where the experts could not, Redford persevered throughout the protracted, ten-year-long legal battle. EarthRights had their case dismissed in 2000, fought back and won by appeal, [6] [7] the right to continue.
As the years passed, the case gained traction. Redford continued with legal work, fundraising and research, and building coalitions with likeminded organizations such as Center for Constitutional Rights. After several years of fighting an uphill battle without losing hope, the rewards finally came, in 2004. Unocal agreed to settle the lawsuit. [5] [8] It was the first time in history that a major multinational corporation had settled a case of this type for monetary damages.
In the landmark settlement, the company agreed to compensate the Burmese villagers who sued the firm for complicity in forced labor, rape, and murder. By combining human rights law and environmental law, EarthRights had come up with a new and untested strategy that succeeded where older solutions had failed. Their story was documented in the 2006 documentary film Total Denial .
Equally importantly, the Unocal case set a strong legal precedent. As a result of Earthrights' efforts, a series of rulings in the California Federal Court [6] established that a corporation can indeed be held liable in U.S. courts for encouraging human rights violations by a foreign government. This put corporations on notice and forced them to consider their actions abroad. Unocal attempted to recover the damages from its insurer. [9] The insurer did not pay, but instead reviewed its policies to ensure that it would not be liable to cover damages for murder, rape, and torture. Then banks began reviewing their liability for funding the projects. Thus, liability for abuse becomes an important business issue, not merely the preoccupation of a few activists.
EarthRights continues to use the Unocal case as a model to fight corporate misbehavior. Working in partnership with other legal organizations and private lawyers, they seeks to remedy abuses of earth rights—all over the world.
Today, at The Equation Campaign, Redford directs strategy, partnerships, and grantmaking focused on ending the expansion of fossil fuels in the United States, where the majority of global expansion is planned.
Biography
Born on March 7, 1968, she was raised in Wellesley, MA and in 1986 she graduated from Wellesley High School. Redford attended Colgate University [10] in rural upstate New York where she was a member of the swimming and diving teams. She found spending six hours a day in the water too much and later quit and began playing rugby, a Division I sport at Colgate.
After graduating from college in 1990, Redford signed on with the WorldTeach program and found herself teaching English in a village on the Thai-Burmese border.
On her summer break she visited a Thai refugee camp and lived with a family who had fled the Burmese military dictatorship. There she taught English in a bamboo hut. Along the border, bombs would explode from battles between the military and its opposition. Every day brought new streams of refugees, with tales of rape, torture, killing, and forced labor.
She headed home and in the fall of 1992, Redford enrolled at the University of Virginia Law School to study human rights and environmental law but as soon as school was out for the summer, she left again for Thailand. This time she went as an intern for Human Rights Watch, documenting abuses associated with forced labor. She returned to the same refugee camp to live with the same Burmese family she had stayed with the summer before. The father, a pro-democracy activist, arranged to sneak her into Burma. (The military, which staged a coup in 1988, officially changed the country's name to Myanmar the following year.)
That year Redford met Ka Hsaw Wa, a Karen student activist who had fled to the jungle and was collecting villagers' tales of abuse under the junta. She spent three weeks with him and a small group paddling up the Salween River, stopping at villages near the front lines of fighting between the military and the opposition and gathering villagers' stories.
The summer after their second year, she and two classmates got a fellowship to look at the World Bank's presence in Thailand and Burma. But Ka Hsaw Wa told them the real story was the Yadana Pipeline, being built by French company Total S.A. and Unocal, which is headquartered in El Segundo, CA. The 39-mile natural gas line cuts through the Burmese jungle to the Thai border.
Her third year, she did an independent research project on the Alien Torts Claims Act and Unocal's role in the Burmese pipeline. She also wrote a grant proposal to start EarthRights International, a nonprofit human rights organization. The day after she took the bar examination, in 1995, she returned to Thailand to live and run the newly formed group with Ka Hsaw Wa and a fellow law school graduate.
In November 1996, Redford and Ka Hsaw Wa were married in a Thai village. The following October, she filed Doe v. Unocal, and in March 1997 it became the first case in which jurisdiction was granted over a corporation for human rights abuses overseas. This case was documented in the 2006 film Total Denial .
A statute of limitations, known in civil law systems as a prescriptive period, is a law passed by a legislative body to set the maximum time after an event within which legal proceedings may be initiated. In most jurisdictions, such periods exist for both criminal law and civil law such as contract law and property law, though often under different names and with varying details.
Defamation is a communication that injures a third party's reputation and causes a legally redressable injury. The precise legal definition of defamation varies from country to country. It is not necessarily restricted to making assertions that are falsifiable, and can extend to concepts that are more abstract than reputation – like dignity and honour. In the English-speaking world, the law of defamation traditionally distinguishes between libel and slander. It is treated as a civil wrong, as a criminal offence, or both.
A tort is a civil wrong that causes a claimant to suffer loss or harm, resulting in legal liability for the person who commits the tortious act. Tort law can be contrasted with criminal law, which deals with criminal wrongs that are punishable by the state. While criminal law aims to punish individuals who commit crimes, tort law aims to compensate individuals who suffer harm as a result of the actions of others. Some wrongful acts, such as assault and battery, can result in both a civil lawsuit and a criminal prosecution in countries where the civil and criminal legal systems are separate. Tort law may also be contrasted with contract law, which provides civil remedies after breach of a duty that arises from a contract. Obligations in both tort and criminal law are more fundamental and are imposed regardless of whether the parties have a contract.
Union Oil Company of California, and its holding company Unocal Corporation, together known as Unocal was a major petroleum explorer and marketer in the late 19th century, through the 20th century, and into the early 21st century. It was headquartered in El Segundo, California, United States.
An abuse of process is the unjustified or unreasonable use of legal proceedings or process to further a cause of action by an applicant or plaintiff in an action. It is a claim made by the respondent or defendant that the other party is misusing or perverting regularly issued court process not justified by the underlying legal action. In common law it is classified as a tort distinct from the intentional tort of malicious prosecution. It is a tort that involves misuse of the public right of access to the courts. In the United States it may be described as a legal process being commenced to gain an unfair litigation advantage.
The Alien Tort Statute, also called the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA), is a section in the United States Code that gives federal courts jurisdiction over lawsuits filed by foreign nationals for torts committed in violation of international law. It was first introduced by the Judiciary Act of 1789 and is one of the oldest federal laws still in effect in the U.S.
Human rights in Myanmar under its military regime have long been regarded as among the worst in the world. In 2022, Freedom House rated Myanmar’s human rights at 9 out 100.
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) is a progressive non-profit legal advocacy organization based in New York City, New York, in the United States. It was founded in 1966 by Arthur Kinoy, William Kunstler and others particularly to support activists in the implementation of civil rights legislation and to achieve social justice.
Human rights in Thailand have long been a contentious issue. The country was among the first to sign the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and seemed committed to upholding its stipulations; in practice, however, those in power have often abused the human rights of the Thai nation with impunity. From 1977 to 1988, Amnesty International (AI) reported that there were whitewashed cases of more than one thousand alleged arbitrary detentions, fifty forced disappearances, and at least one hundred instances of torture and extrajudicial killings. In the years since then, AI demonstrated that little had changed, and Thailand's overall human rights record remained problematic. A 2019 HRW report expanded on AI's overview as it focuses specifically on the case of Thailand, as the newly government of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha assumes power in mid-2019, Thailand's human rights record shows no signs of change.
Maung Maung is a Burmese trade unionist. During his studies, he earned a Bachelor of Science in geology.
Bowoto v. Chevron Corp. was a lawsuit against Chevron Nigeria Ltd., a subsidiary of Chevron USA, which went to trial in 2008 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. The plaintiffs, Nigerian citizens who had been injured during or who had survived human rights violations perpetrated by Nigerian military personnel, alleged that the Chevron subsidiary backed the military action and that the parent company thus should bear liability in US courts for the resultant fallout. The suit was decided on December 1, 2008, when nine jurors unanimously agreed Chevron was not liable for any of the numerous allegations. Judgment was entered the next day, officially exonerating Chevron.
Ka Hsaw Wa is a Burmese human rights activist. He is a member of the Karen indigenous group. Along with his wife, environmental and human rights attorney Katie Redford, he is the co-founder and co-director of EarthRights International (ERI), an organization that focuses on human rights in Burma and other areas "where protection of human rights and the environment is intrinsically connected." Ka Hsaw Wa and Katie Redford have two young children.
The Yadana gas field is an offshore gas field in the Andaman Sea. It is located about 60 kilometres (37 mi) offshore to the nearest landfall in Myanmar. The gas field is an important source of revenue for the Myanmar Army. Gas from Yadana is used to generate about 8 percent of the electricity in neighbouring Thailand and around half of all electricity in Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon.
Human rights violations in Aceh, Indonesia occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s when ExxonMobil hired Indonesian military units to guard their Arun gas field, and these military units raided and razed local villages. Government inquiries have extensively documented these abuses. Victims allege that ExxonMobil knew about the atrocities, which include assault, torture, and murder, and should be liable for them. The company denies these accusations; its primary defense is that the human rights violations which were occurring were not a result of specific intention of the organization and therefore it cannot be held liable.
The Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) is a US non-profit international human rights organization based in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1998, CJA represents survivors of torture and other grave human rights abuses in cases against individual rights violators before U.S. and Spanish courts. CJA has pioneered the use of civil litigation in the United States as a means of redress for survivors from around the world.
Doe v. Unocal, 395 F.3d 932, opinion vacated and rehearing en banc granted, 395 F.3d 978, was a lawsuit filed against Unocal for alleged human rights violations.
John Doe VII v. Exxon Mobil Corp (09–7125) is a lawsuit filed in the United States by 11 Indonesian villagers against ExxonMobil Corporation alleging that the company is responsible for human rights violations in the oil-rich province of Aceh, Indonesia. The case has broad implications for multinational corporations doing business in other countries. Indonesian security forces committed torture, rape, and murder against the plaintiffs and their families while under contract with ExxonMobil to guard the Arun gas field during the late 1990s and early 2000s; plaintiffs claim that Exxon is responsible for these atrocities.
Holding corporations accountable for either direct conduct or complicity for human rights violations has become an increasing area of attention in promoting human rights. Multinational corporations in particular have been singled out as important figures, for better or worse, in the maintenance of human rights given their economic status and international dimension. As it currently stands there is no mechanism at the international level which can hold corporations legally accountable. Reliance has instead been placed upon a number of soft law instruments the most important one of which is the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. With the potential exception for redress under the Alien Tort Statute corporations are only legally accountable for human rights violations under the municipal law of the Nation in which the violation is alleged to have occurred or the company is based.
Jesner v. Arab Bank, PLC, No. 16-499, 584 U.S. ___ (2018), was a case from the United States Supreme Court which addressed the issue of corporate liability under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). Plaintiffs alleged that Arab Bank facilitated terrorist attacks by transferring funds to terrorist groups in the Middle East, some of which passed through Arab Bank's offices in New York City.
EarthRights International (ERI) is an American nonprofit human rights and environmental organization founded in 1995 by Katie Redford, Ka Hsaw Wa, and Tyler Giannini.
