For a long time, left-leaning NGOs have been using the courts to advance their causes. In particular when it comes to migration and environmental policy. An important court case was the 2021 ruling by the district court in The Hague, at the request of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) like Milieudefensie. There, the court decided that Shell had to reduce its CO2 emissions by 45% by 2030 compared to 2019. Eventually, Shell got its way, but not before going through the whole judicial route, while victory was anything but guaranteed.
The tables were turned with the court case launched by American energy company Energy Transfer in the United States against Greenpeace over its protest tactics against the Dakota Access Pipeline. There, one of the most well-known green NGO’s, was on the losing side. Earlier this year, a North Dakota judge ordered it to pay 345 million dollars to the American company that built the pipeline. Greenpeace was thereby found liable for defamation, sabotage, trespassing and deliberately interfering with the business operations of the company. Greenpeace has been warning that it may be “forced to go bankrupt.”
Forum shopping
In response, Greenpeace launched a court case in the Netherlands against Energy Transfer, even before the full US procedure is completed. This smacks of “forum shopping”, which refers to the practice of selecting the most favourable jurisdiction or court for initiating legal action. Critics of the practice have called it a strategy to choose a jurisdiction for its favourable substantive law or to avoid unfavourable procedural laws in another forum. As a result, quite a few countries have introduce measures to curb abusive forum shopping. Courts have for example applied doctrines like “forum non conveniens”, which allows to dismiss cases that would be more appropriately heard elsewhere, or impose stricter jurisdictional requirements to prevent frivolous or opportunistic claims.
In this case however, things have turned out differently. While it is in the losing side in the U.S., its Dutch proceedings have started with a success. At the beginning of June, the Amsterdam District Court declared itself competent to hear Greenpeace’s claim against the US company. To be clear, this is merely a decision on whether the case needs to be considered. It is unrelated to the merits of the green NGO’s claims. Even in assessing the competency matter, the court has limited itself to what is calls a “prima facie assessment”.
The court considers article 6(e) of the Dutch Code of Civil Procedure to be the legal basis to permit Greenpeace’s case to continue, broadly because the green NGO may be suffering financial damage in the Netherlands, as well as some “additional circumstances”. A key consideration for the court is thereby that Greenpeace’s “centre of interests is in Amsterdam.”
Greenpeace did however suffer a defeat as well in the ruling, as it had tried to invoke the EU’s new SLAPP Directive, which aims to discourage trivial lawsuits brought to intimidate weaker opponents. This directive however cannot be used, according to the court, simply because it has no retroactive effect. In the first place, to claim that the lawsuit would be trivial was always a hard sell, given the fact that the US company has gained the upper hand during the legal proceedings dealing with the heart of the matter.
U.S. concerns
In the United States, the case has raised eyebrows among legal commentators. Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, complained in the newspaper that “in its European lawsuit, Greenpeace does not offer any new evidence to dispute the findings of the North Dakota jury, which spent weeks hearing expert testimony and studying the evidence.” He worries for the consequences of Greenpeace ultimately also prevailing in the final ruling, noting: “If groups such as Greenpeace are granted de facto immunity from European courts to break American laws, their tactics would almost certainly become more violent and more damaging.”
In Bloomberg Law, US lawyer Charles B. Meyer furthermore reminds his readers that it was a Dutch 17th-century jurist, “Ulrich Huber, [who] developed the concept of comitas gentium—the civility of nations—as the foundation of private international law. Huber argued that foreign judgments should be honoured unless doing so would undermine state sovereignty or citizens’ rights. Nothing about the North Dakota verdict meets that exception.”
He worries that “the resulting uncertainty” due to success for Greenpeace in the Netherlands “would send a chilling message to US companies operating in Europe and threaten the stability of major trade agreements—most notably the $750 billion US–EU energy pact through which Europe has committed to importing American liquefied natural gas. That deal is more than economic—it’s a strategic realignment designed to reduce Europe’s reliance on Russian energy and strengthen transatlantic ties.”
Only last week, the European Parliament approved the EU-US deal on tariffs, which had been concluded in July 2025. Surely, these kinds of high profile lawsuits are unlikely to improve the mood between the EU-US trade relationship.
Green claims
Then even apart from the trade relationship with the United States, there is a problem in the EU. In October 2025, the Financial Times carried the headline that “Europe has become a risky place for corporate green claims” after a Paris court found French energy company Total guilty of “misleading commercial practices” in its public claims to be a “major actor in the energy transition.”
The newspaper thereby noted that it was not only striking given the fact that TotalEnergies has spent $4.8bn of capital expenditure on low-carbon energy” in 2024 but also that “the case is an important reflection of the tightening legal constraints in the EU around green claims by companies, following recent greenwashing verdicts against airlines KLM and Lufthansa.”
This should all serve as an important reminder that even if the political consensus in Europe has clearly turned against green overregulation, this change of political heart won’t be enough. Adapting the existing legal framework will be needed to make an actual difference for policy.
