Shell settles New York trial over human rights violations in Nigeria

Nigeria's activist leader Ken Saro Wiwa at the Ogani Day demonstration in Nigeria, January 1993. He was sentenced to death on charges of murder along with his co-defendants, eight members of the Ogani movement in October 1995. Photograph: Greenpeace/AFP

Friday Zorzor, a grave digger at a Port Harcourt, cemetery in Nigeria, points out graves where US investigators are trying to unravel a mystery and exhume what are believed to be the remains of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the internationally known Nigerian playwright and activist. After Nigeria's former ruling military hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995, security agents warned cemetery workers that the body's whereabouts was a secret they should carry to their own graves. During an exhumation lasting several weeks, a pair of American forensic experts dug up what they believe are the bones and skulls of Saro-Wiwa and seven others of the so-called Ogoni Nine. Photograph: Boris Heger/AP

Shell's oil and gas terminal on Bonny Island in southern Nigeria's Niger Delta. Photograph: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP

A Nigerian Shell worker watches over a well head that spilled crude oil near the Niger river delta village of Oloibiri in Bayelsa state of Nigeria, June 2004. The Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell has sent a clean-up team to try to contain an oil slick after suspected oil thieves unleashed tonnes of crude oil in southern Nigeria. Photograph: George Esiri/Reuters

A privately owned water tap is locked in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, October 2004. Port Harcourt, the oil capital of Africa is a crowded city plagued by crime where most people live on mud streets without electricity, running water or sewer. Despite producing 2.26 million barrels of oil a day, 60 percent of Nigerians live below the poverty line. Photograph: Jacob Silberberg/Getty Images

Oil from a leaking pipeline burns in Goi-Bodo, a swamp area of the Niger Delta in Nigeria, October 2004. Oil company Royal Dutch Shell said the leak was caused by unknown saboteurs on Monday who used a hacksaw to cut open a major pipeline feeding oil to an export terminal at Bonny, southern Nigeria. Photograph: Austin Ekeinde/Reuters

A Shell owned pumping site in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Photograph: Chris Hondros/Getty Images

A young girl sells drinks to workers at the Trans-Amadi Slaughter, the main abbatoir of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Animals are killed in the open and their skins burned by the flames of old tyres, which creates thick clouds of black smoke over the city. Fish had been the traditional source of protein in the Niger Delta, but fish stocks have dwindled due to pollution from the oil industry and over-fishing. Photograph: Ed Kashi/Corbis

Workers subcontracted by Shell Oil Company clean up an oil spill from an abandoned Shell Petroleum Development Company well, in Oloibiri Town, Bayelsa, Nigeria. Wellhead 14 was closed in 1977 but has been leaking for years, and in June of 2004 it finally released an oil spill of over 20,000 barrels of crude oil. Photograph: Ed Kashi/Corbis

Macon Hawkins from Kosciusko Texas, held hostage and surrounded by militants, speaks to journalists in the Niger Delta area in February 2006. Nine foreign oil workers were kidnapped by militants who stormed a barge belonging to a US oil company in the Niger Delta's Forcados estuary. The kidnappers are demanding that people in the country's south receive a greater share of their region's oil wealth. Photograph: George Osodi/AP

Lili Okrika stands at the entrance to their shack house in Biriya-Ama a village near Port Harcourt, Nigeria, February 2006. The village of palm-frond huts in Nigeria's southern Niger Delta region sits atop one of Africa's richest energy deposits but it remains mired in deep poverty. Photograph: George Osodi/AP

Local youths walk on oil pipeline belonging to the Shell Oil company in Utorogun, Nigeria, 5 March 2006. Photograph: George Osodi/AP

Women dry tapioca beside flames from Shell's Utorogu flow station in Otu Jerenmi in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta, March 2006. Nigerian militants threatened on Sunday to halve the country's current oil output by cutting another 1 million barrels a day this month in their campaign to gain more autonomy for the southern Delta region. Photograph: George Esiri/Reuters

Former security guard Esakpo Henry displays fingers wet with oil leaking from the flow station where he worked until an attack by militants led Shell to close the station earlier this year, in Eriemu, Nigeria, October 2006. Photograph: George Osodi/AP

A participant dances while holding a placard saying Shell, Remember Saro-Wiwa, at the closing ceremonies of the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya, 24 January 2007. Photograph: Stephen Morrison /EPA

Writer Ken Wiwa, whose father Ken Saro Wiwa was executed by the Nigerian government in 1995 after asserting the rights of the Ogoni people. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Children play on an abandoned Shell flowstation in Korokoro, Ogoniland, Nigeria, in May 2007. Tiny Ogoniland offers a glimpse of the oil industry's worst-case scenario: an absolute shutdown of production across the wider Niger Delta, where strife has already cut production by a quarter. Photograph: George Osodi/AP

Fighters with the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) raise their rifles to celebrate news of a successful operation by their colleagues against the Nigerian army in the Niger Delta on September 2008. MEND has declared a full-scale "oil war" against the Nigerian authorities in response to attacks by the Nigerian military launched against the militants. Photograph: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP

A Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel at Bonga field, more than 65 miles from land in the Niger Delta which was attacked in June 2008, causing Royal Dutch Shell to shut down production. A leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta said that militants in open-hulled boats traveled through heavy seas to attack the Bonga oil field, but they were not able to enter a computer control room they had hoped to destroy. Photograph: AP