Law & Regulation

Ramalingam Murugan, a migrant worker from Tamil Nadu, India, was employed by ship repair company Rigel Marine Services in Singapore. In January 2021, he fell off a company lorry and fractured his leg. Read More

Moti Group, a business conglomerate based in Johannesburg, tried to stop amaBhungane, a South African investigative news website, from reporting on leaked documents about an allegedly corrupt mining deal in Zimbabwe. A court-issued gag order was overturned on appeal in July 2023. Read More

Próspera, a company based in the U.S. state of Delaware, has invoked an investor-state dispute settlement treaty to try to force the government of Honduras to pay US$11 billion for outlawing the company’s plan to operate a privately run city on the island of Roatán. Read More

Mobil Corporation (now ExxonMobil) began drilling in the Arun gas field in northern Sumatra in the 1970s. Indonesian soldiers, who were paid to provide security for the gas field, attacked local villages during a civil war against the Free Aceh Movement in the 1990s. Read More

Environmental groups Forest Ethics (now named Stand.Earth) and Greenpeace were sued by logging company Resolute Forestry Products for criticizing the impact of the company’s boreal forest logging on dwindling woodland caribou herds. A California judge tossed out the C$100 million lawsuit after a seven-year court battle. Read More

In August 2020, a huge explosion in the port of Beirut, Lebanon, killed 218 people. The cause was determined to be a fire that ignited a cargo of ammonium nitrate fertilizer that had brought to the port on the MV Rhosus, a ship registered to Savaro Ltd., a UK company. Victims’ families sued Savoro in UK courts – and in February the High Court of Justice in London ruled that Savoro needs to compensate the affected families. Read More

Palm oil and timber giant Korindo sued Mighty Earth and Rettet den Regenwald, environmental groups based in Washington DC and Hamburg, Germany, respectively, for publicly criticizing the companies’ deforestation of West Papua, Indonesia. When the court indicated that it would rule in favor of the NGOs this past February, Korindo agreed to drop the lawsuit. Read More

On a secure military base in Tecamachalco, a Mexico City suburb, lies the country’s only gun shop. Prospective customers must fill out multiple forms before being allowed to enter and view weapons locked in glass cases. Advertising the store is illegal – so most Mexicans remain ignorant of its existence. Read More

The Pakistan Accord on Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry signed in December 2022 is designed to prevent tragedies like the Ali Enterprises factory fire in 2012 in Karachi, Pakistan that killed some 260 workers. It is modeled on a similar initiative that was created in Bangladesh after the Rana Plaza Fire that killed over 1,100. Read More

In the 1920s the city of Los Angeles produced a quarter of the world’s oil supply. A century later, the city council voted 12-0 to ban new oil and gas extraction and shut down existing operations, dealing a major defeat to companies like Freeport McMoRan which still operate dozens of wells inside the city. Read More