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	Greenpeace must pay at least $660m over Dakota pipeline protests, says jury by Guardian News   Mar. 2025   A jury in North Dakota has decided that the environmental group Greenpeace must pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the pipeline company Energy Transfer and is liable for defamation and other claims over protests in the state nearly a decade ago.   Energy Transfer Partners, a Dallas-based oil and gas company worth almost $70bn, had sued Greenpeace, alleging defamation and orchestrating criminal behavior by protesters at the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and 2017, claiming the organization “incited” people to protest by using a “misinformation campaign”.   Greenpeace, which had denied the claims, said in a statement after the verdict that lawsuits like this were aimed at “destroying the right to peaceful protest”; constitutional rights experts had expressed fears that the case could have a wider chilling effect on free speech.   The nine-person jury in Mandan, North Dakota, found in favor of Energy Transfer on most counts after more than two days of deliberations. It awarded Energy Transfer at least $660m, according to calculations from Greenpeace.   The environmental group, which had expressed concerns before the trial about getting a fair hearing in oil and gas country, said that a loss and an enormous financial award could bankrupt their US operation. Energy Transfer sued three Greenpeace entities, claiming that they are a single organization rather than independent members of the Greenpeace network. Greenpeace will appeal the decision, the organization said.   The case has been closely watched by the wider non-profit community and first amendment experts amid concerns over how it could affect activism.   “What we saw over these three weeks was Energy Transfer’s blatant disregard for the voices of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. And while they also tried to distort the truth about Greenpeace’s role in the protests, we instead reaffirmed our unwavering commitment to non-violence in every action we take,” said Deepa Padmanabha, Greenpeace’s senior legal adviser.   “We should all be concerned about the future of the first amendment, and lawsuits like these aimed at destroying our rights to peaceful protest and free speech. Greenpeace will continue to do its part to fight for the protection of these fundamental rights for everyone,” Padmanabha said.   Greenpeace International was one of the three entities sued by Energy Transfer. Its general counsel, Kristin Casper, said the organization’s fight would continue: “Energy Transfer hasn’t heard the last of us in this fight. We’re just getting started with our anti-Slapp [strategic lawsuits against public participation] lawsuit against Energy Transfer’s attacks on free speech and peaceful protest. We will see Energy Transfer in court this July in the Netherlands. We will not back down, we will not be silenced.”   Energy Transfer thanked the judge and jury in a statement, saying: “While we are pleased that Greenpeace has been held accountable for their actions against us, this win is really for the people of Mandan and throughout North Dakota who had to live through the daily harassment and disruptions caused by the protesters who were funded and trained by Greenpeace. It is also a win for all law-abiding Americans who understand the difference between the right to free speech and breaking the law..”   During jury selection, potential jurors appeared to largely dislike the protests, and many had ties to the fossil fuel industry. In the end, more than half the jurors selected to hear the case had ties to the fossil fuel industry, and most had negative views of anti-pipeline protests or groups that oppose the use of fossil fuels.   “Today’s verdict is not a reflection of wrongdoing on Greenpeace’s part, but rather the result of a long list of courtroom tactics and propaganda tricks that Energy Transfer used to deny Greenpeace its right to a fair trial,” said Kirk Herbertson, a New York attorney and the US director for advocacy and campaigns for EarthRights International. “We hope that the North Dakota supreme court will question why this case ever made it to trial in the first place.”   Concerns over finding an unbiased jury plagued the case even before it began, given the rightward political leanings of Mandan, North Dakota, and the distaste for the protests among local residents. Mysterious rightwing mailers, made to look like a newspaper called “Central ND News”, that contained articles slanted against the pipeline protest or in favor of Energy Transfer were also sent to residents in recent months, which Greenpeace alleged could taint the jury pool.   Greenpeace sought to move the trial to another venue in North Dakota multiple times, but was shot down by the county court and the North Dakota supreme court. The judge, James Gion, who was brought in to preside over the case after all Morton county judges recused themselves, denied requests for livestreaming, which the state supreme court also denied.   Legal sources have said the case is a classic example of a Slapp – a form of civil litigation increasingly deployed by corporations, politicians and wealthy individuals to deliberately wear down and silence critics including journalists, activists and watchdog groups. These cases, even when the entities suing lose, cause significant legal costs for defendants and can have a chilling effect.   The five-week trial saw Energy Transfer attempt to tie a host of misdeeds or disruptions caused by the protests to Greenpeace, which has maintained that its involvement was small and at the request of the Standing Rock Tribe.   Standing Rock released a statement after the trial began affirming it had led the protests and claiming the tribe had had ongoing issues with getting safety information from Energy Transfer. The pipeline company was “frivolously alleging defamation and seeking money damages, designed to shut down all voice supporting Standing Rock. The case is an attempt to silence our Tribe about the truth of what happened at Standing Rock, and the threat posed by DAPL to our land, our water and our people. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe will not be silenced,” the tribal chairperson, Janet Alkire, wrote.   In the final days of the case, Kelcy Warren, Energy Transfer’s billionaire founder and a major donor to Donald Trump, said in a video deposition that his company had offered financial incentives – including money, a luxury ranch and a new school – to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to stop the protests, which the tribe declined, according to a group of monitors attending the trial because of concerns over its fairness. Warren claimed he believed the tribe refused the offer because it was offered more by Earthjustice, which has served as a legal representative of the tribe.   The trial-monitoring committee released a statement after the verdict saying that the trial had been “deeply flawed” and denied Greenpeace the ability to present a full defense. The committee monitored every part of the trial and concluded the jury had been biased in favor of Energy Transfer and the judge lacked full legal knowledge of the complex issues at hand.   Marty Garbus, a longtime first amendment lawyer who is part of the monitoring group, said: “In my six decades of legal practice, I have never witnessed a trial as unfair as the one against Greenpeace that just ended in the courts of North Dakota … Greenpeace has a very strong case on appeal. I believe there is a good chance it ultimately will win both in court and in the court of public opinion.”   The trial came after Energy Transfer first filed a Rico lawsuit in federal court in 2017. The federal racketeering case was dismissed on 14 February 2019, but seven days later Energy Transfer refiled a virtually identical suit in North Dakota state court.   http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/greenpeace-lawsuit-energy-transfer-dakota-pipeline http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/73572/jury-delivers-verdict-finding-greenpeace-entities-liable-for-more-than-660-million-in-energy-transfer-slapp-trial/ http://www.commondreams.org/opinion/greenpeace-verdict-attack-on-advocacy http://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/03/usa-verdict-against-greenpeace-sets-damaging-precedent/ http://climatenetwork.org/2025/03/20/energy-transfer-sinister-attack-on-greenpeace-climate-action-network-member/ Visit the related web page
	Online ‘manosphere’ is moving misogyny to the mainstream by Conor Lennon United Nations News, agencies   Mar. 2025   A decline in democracy and harmful content spread on social media platforms are helping to drive a backlash against feminism, and the growth of misogynistic and retrograde ideas about the roles of men and women and society.   The pushback against gender equality is one of the findings in a major report from UN Women, the UN agency for gender equality, on the progress made so far in advancing women’s rights worldwide.   This latest version of the study, which is updated every five years, comes at a time of great uncertainty, as several donors announce major funding cuts, leading to the disruption of essential services for women worldwide.   The report measures the extent to which the aims of a groundbreaking women’s rights accord adopted in Beijing in 1995. Around a quarter of countries surveyed note a backlash against feminism and gender equality.   However, it is not all bad news: there have been many encouraging signs of progress over the last thirty years, from legal protections for women, to services and support for survivors of domestic abuse and bans on gender-based discrimination in the workplace.   Ahead of the launch of the report, Laura Turquet, the deputy head of the research and data team at UN Women, and Lydia Alpizar, a Costa Rican feminist activist based in Mexico City, spoke to UN News about the reasons for this renewed attack against feminism and what it means for the state of gender relations.   Laura Turquet: What we’re talking about is organised resistance to gains that have been made on gender equality, whether that's preventing the implementation of existing commitments, rolling them back or stopping new laws and policies.   Examples include the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States [a US Supreme Court decision that protected the right to abortion] and the decision by several European countries to pull out of the Istanbul Convention [a treaty on gender-based violence]. And elsewhere, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, we’ve seen a defunding of women’s ministries, or their mandates are changed from focusing on gender equality to a broader focus on families and children, which waters down their ability to drive policies forward.   Another element is the targeting of women's rights defenders and activists, women in politics, journalists and trade unionists who dare put their heads above the parapet and speak out on gender equality.   Lydia Alpizar: There most common form of attack is harassment and defamation, including criminalization, building fabricated charges against women's human rights defenders, or even arbitrarily detaining them, turning them into political prisoners.   It can also lead to more lethal forms of violence, such as disappearances and killings. In Mexico and Central America, we have documented 35,000 attacks on and 200 killings of women human rights defenders since 2012.   UN News: Is the situation in your region getting worse?   Lydia Alpizar: Yes. When we started, we didn't have as many killings. Right now, we have an open dictatorship in Nicaragua where there are political prisoners including women, and there are other countries with women’s rights defenders in prison, including Mexico. There are other defenders that are in prison, such as Kenia Hernandez in Mexico, or others who are protecting nature in El Salvador.   We are definitely seeing an increase in attacks on feminists working on gender-based violence, political participation an access to sexual and reproductive health and rights: the highest levels of abuse take place during March, which is women’s month, when most marches and public demonstrations in support of women take place.   UN News: What are the reasons for the increased threats and violence?   Lydia Alpizar: One has to do with the way in which agendas for gender equality and women's rights have been transforming the world.   We have definitely made progress across important areas that are included in the Beijing Declaration, in terms of legislation, policies and cultural transformation, really changing the way in which women are recognized in their public and private lives.   More women are leading movements that are challenging the interest of very powerful actors, so there is a backlash.   UN News: So, the pushback is a response to the progress that is being made?   Laura Turquet: I think that is true to a large extent, but it also goes hand in hand with a decline in the strength of democracies in general. Many countries are experiencing the erosion of key democratic institutions such as freedom of the press, free and fair elections, and the rights of women to speak in public.   They become a target of those who want to return to an imagined past where men and women had much more traditional roles.   It’s also linked to rising inequality. A few people at the top are doing extremely well whilst millions are being left behind. When people feel that they can't access a decent job or a basic standard of living, they look for scapegoats, whether it's migrants, LGBTQ people, or women who are speaking up.   UN News: Social media also seems to be connected, bringing formerly fringe ideas into the mainstream.   Lydia Alpizar: We have seen an increase of these kinds of narratives. Social media is a big platform for the dissemination of misogynistic and sexist ideas and women’s rights defenders are called bad mothers to stigmatize the work that they do and there is a trend of legitimizing violence against them.   Laura Turquet: There has a been a development of a “manosphere,” an online ecosystem where extreme and outdated ideas, particularly about violence against women, but also related to a very narrow kind of idea of masculinity.   But I also want to say that online spaces and social media have been a place where feminists can organize and link up with other kinds of social movement. I think we just have to make sure that those spaces are safe and that we root out misogynist and violent online environments so that women are not targeted in that way.   UN News: On balance, is the world in a better place, when it comes to gender relations?   Lydia Alpizar: Yes, absolutely. In the countries where I work, gender relations have been transformed and the world is a different place for women. Their is hope, but we're concerned about the challenges we face right now.   Laura Turquet: There has been significant progress since 1995. The proportion of women in parliaments has doubled, violence against women is on the political agenda in a way that it wasn’t thirty years ago, and maternal mortality has declined by a third.   But there's still so much to do. We need to make sure that 2025 is the year that we don't back down, that we continue to fight for justice, and we continue to march forward for the rights of women and girls.   http://www.unwomen.org/en/get-involved/international-womens-day http://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2025-03/womens-rights-in-review-30-years-after-beijing-en.pdf http://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/feature-story/2025/02/womens-rights-in-2025-hope-resilience-and-the-fight-against-backlash http://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/timeline/never-backing-down-women-march-forward-for-equal-rights http://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/explainer/the-beijing-declaration-and-platform-for-action-at-30-and-why-that-matters-for-gender-equality http://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/press-release/2024/10/two-billion-women-and-girls-worldwide-lack-access-to-any-form-of-social-protection-un-women-report-shows   http://equalitynow.org/resource/words-deeds-beijing30-report/ http://www.unicef.org/adolescent-girls-rights http://www.helpage.org/news/social-protection-can-transform-lives-of-older-women/ http://www.unfpa.org/emergencies http://www.unfpa.org/news/explainer-why-investing-women-and-girls-benefits-everyone http://news.un.org/en/story/2025/02/1160631 http://www.unhcr.org/news/press-releases/amid-funding-crunch-unhcr-issues-urgent-call-protect-women-and-girls-surging http://globaltaxjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Final-GDOA-Concept-Note-2025-EN.pdf http://www.ids.ac.uk/news/podcast-strategies-for-countering-gender-backlash http://blog.witness.org/2025/03/technology-facilitated-gender-based-violence/ http://gi-escr.org/en/resources/publications/a-care-led-transition-to-a-sustainable-future http://equalmeasures2030.org/2024-sdg-gender-index/ Visit the related web page
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