Greenpeace

In 2024, the multinational oil and gas company Shell launched an unprecedented legal action against Greenpeace UK, Greenpeace International and nine individuals for approximately $1 million dollars (£800,000 pounds) in London in relation to a peaceful protest opposing the company’s actions in the context of the climate crisis. 

In January 2023, Greenpeace activists boarded the White Marlin ship north of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic. This ship was transporting a Shell production platform to the North Sea. It was the focus of Greenpeace’s protest “because, at peak production, it is expected to help yield the equivalent of 45,000 barrels of oil per day.”  Within days of the start of the protest, which lasted nearly two weeks, Shell secured two injunctions against Greenpeace, one of which prevented them from assisting any other protesters to board the platform. The only damage that Shell identified during the protest was allegedly to a padlock, which Greenpeace denied.

The next month, Shell lodged its multimillion dollar legal action, initially threatening to sue for more than $8 million dollars (£6.5 million) in damages. At the same time, Shell asked all of Greenpeace’s national and regional organisations to sign an undertaking to indefinitely desist from intervening with any of Shell’s equipment at sea or port, no matter its location. These requests were not contained in the claim that Shell filed in December 2023, which also reduced the amount to $1 million (£800,000). According to Greenpeace, “The suit remained one of the largest legal threats Greenpeace UK has faced in over fifty years of campaigning as a result of $10 million in legal costs Shell planned to recover from Greenpeace.”

During negotiations, Shell offered to withdraw the claim if Greenpeace undertook no further actions against their rigs in the future. In response to Shell’s claim, Greenpeace coordinated a public campaign to draw attention to the lawsuit and what it could mean for other environmental campaigns in the future. Celebrities such as Joe Lycett, Stephen Fry and Emma Thomson voiced their support.

In December 2024, it was announced publicly that Shell and Greenpeace had reached a settlement, where Greenpeace agreed to donate £300,000 to Royal National Lifeboat Association (RNLI). It also promised to refrain from protesting at three of Shell’s North Sea oil and gas fields for a duration of five years and another one for a duration of ten years. Announcing the settlement, Greenpeace said: “These are largely declining fields where Shell has been drilling for years and where we had no plans to intervene by direct action. Even so, we don’t like having to make this kind of concession to a fossil fuel company, but the alternative could have been much worse.” The campaigning organisation also stated that the prohibitive costs of defending the legal action influenced their decision to settle: “This is the absurd nature of SLAPP suits: even if Greenpeace had gone on to win the case, we could still have ended up worse off than by settling the case at this early stage.”