Ecuador: Villagers try again to hold Chevron to $18bn ruling

Villagers have filed a second lawsuit in a foreign country, this time in Brazil, in an effort to enforce an $18bn (£11.6bn) court ruling against the US oil company Chevron for polluting the Amazon River, their lawyers said.

The 2011 judgment against Chevron is one of the biggest rulings ever for environmental damage. The legal case has spanned nearly two decades and is being watched closely by multinationals accused of pollution elsewhere in the world.

Issued by an Ecuadorean court in Lago Agrio, the jungle region at the heart of the dispute, the ruling was upheld by an appeals court in January – but Chevron has appealed to Ecuador's Supreme Court.

Since Chevron no longer has assets in Ecuador, the villagers are trying to get the ruling enforced outside the country. Last month they filed a legal lawsuit against the oil company in Canada.

"[It] is the second filing to force the company to pay for the clean-up of a disaster that decimated indigenous groups and caused an outbreak of cancer and other oil-related diseases," they said in a statement.