Even before a North Dakota jury handed down a $345 million civil verdict against Greenpeace for its conduct around the Dakota Access Pipeline, the campaign group did something telling. Rather than appeal in the United States, where the trial took place, it filed a parallel suit in the Netherlands and asked a Dutch court to declare the entire American proceeding an “abusive” prosecution under the EU’s anti-SLAPP Directive.
An Amsterdam court heard arguments on April 16, with a ruling expected by June 3. In practice, the case asks a European judge to function as an appellate reviewer of an American jury trial. If Brussels tolerates it, the consequences will not stop at the Atlantic shoreline, and it will come back to haunt European consumers and industries.
The North Dakota case was not about climate speech. After a three-week trial, a nine-member jury found Greenpeace USA, Greenpeace International and the Greenpeace Fund liable for defamation, trespass, tortious interference and civil conspiracy during the Standing Rock protests. The damages presented at trial included over $60 million in additional security costs, $80 million in delayed pipeline operations, and $96 million in refinancing costs after Greenpeace’s pressure campaign cost the operator its banking relationships. Pipeline pumps were vandalised. Hydraulic hoses were cut. Bulldozers were set on fire. None of that is protected speech under any honest reading of European or American law. They went too far and that has no defense in a court of any stripe.
A directive written to defend speech should not become the instrument that silences a verdict
The EU’s anti-SLAPP Directive was not written to relitigate any of it. It was written to protect journalists, civil society groups and whistleblowers from being buried under nuisance suits by powerful interests trying to silence them. That is a worthy purpose. It is not the purpose Greenpeace is now putting it to, namely exempting itself from what can only be considered sabotage. The directive is being repurposed as an instrument to overturn an adverse verdict in another jurisdiction, after the fact, in a country whose courts had no role in hearing the underlying dispute.
This matters for Europe because the same litigation playbook is already being run on European soil on projects we’re often told are of vital economic importance. INEOS Project One, the €4 billion ethane cracker rising at the Port of Antwerp, is the largest petrochemicals investment in Europe in nearly three decades and is designed to be the lowest-emissions plant of its kind ever built. Greenpeace and ClientEarth have spent two years trying to strangle it in the Walloon and Flemish courts. The permit was pulled in 2023, reinstated in 2024, and the litigation continues. A 1.5-megaton-per-year facility supporting thousands of jobs is being held hostage to lawsuits that are not really about ethylene or the climate at all.
Europe cannot have it both ways. It cannot, on one hand, spend four years rebuilding its energy supply away from Russian pipeline gas and toward more than $13 billion a year in American LNG, and on the other hand, allow its own courts to be used as an offshore appeals chamber for activists trying to sabotage the very infrastructure that makes that supply possible.
Judicial trust is not a one-way street
Three reforms would protect both European industry, consumers, and the integrity of the directive. First, the European Commission should clarify, urgently, that the anti-SLAPP Directive does not extend to collateral attacks on fully adjudicated foreign verdicts. Its purpose is to shield genuine civic actors before and during litigation, not to give defendants a second bite after losing abroad. Second, member-state courts should refuse to entertain proceedings that would place a European judge in the position of reviewing a foreign jury. Judicial trust is not a one-way street. If a Dutch company received an adverse ruling in Rotterdam, no one in Europe would expect a Houston court to second-guess it. Third, EU energy and trade officials should treat permitting reform for projects like INEOS Project One and other energy innovations as a matter of strategic security, not a courtesy to industry.
Greenpeace has every right to protest, to lobby and to litigate as much as any other NGO. It does not have the right to turn Dutch courts into a veto over verdicts handed down by juries thousands of miles away, or over the energy infrastructure Europe spent the last four years rebuilding.
A directive written to defend speech should not become the instrument that silences a verdict.
Bill Wirtz is senior policy analyst at the Consumer Choice Center. He is a co-author of “No Foreign Veto on American Energy Verdicts: Putting a stop to International Energy Lawfare”.
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