Donziger at the Tomorrowland festival: "The worst sin in life is not to use the power you have"

(As one of the world’s largest music festivals, Tomorrowland attracts 500,000 people from 200 countries every July to Belgium to celebrate and enjoy electronic dance music. This year, the organizers invited me to a speaker’s summit called Love Tomorrow held the day before the opening. Thousands of people attended. I used the opportunity to recount my journey battling the fossil fuel industry and I shared my perspective on how young people might think about confronting the world’s challenges. I have spent a lot of time in Europe cultivating support for the legal work of the Amazon communities against Chevron. It was deeply satisfying to return and connect with old friends after Chevron had my passport confiscated for seven years, denying my my right to travel and forcing me to turn down an invitation to the same event in 2022.

(Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription on this platform to help support my writing and my broader human rights advocacy. You can go to FreeDonziger.com to learn more about my work. A written copy of my speech, which differs in some respects from what I said on stage, follows. Thank you! — Steven)

We are here today as a very representative example of the best life force -- the very life force that Trump, Musk, Thiel and the vultures who are starting wars, and financing genocide, and destroying the planet don’t want to see happen.

I am here to tell you that if we keep our goals are clear and our focus strong, we can’t be stopped.

We have awesome power. Look around this space and feel it. I’ve learned over the course of my life that we have more power than we know. They spend massive funds trying to convince us we have less power than we have. Trying to disconnect us from each other. Trying to demoralize us and even lock us up if we pose too much of a threat to their power.

They want us to think real political change is futile; that trying to save the planet is futile. We are not that stupid. That’s why we are here at this festival – or at least one reason we are here.

Because dancing in the current environment – feeling joy — is not only fun but I believe is an act of political defiance.

I’m going to talk about power. And how one of the worst sins in life is not to use the power you have – and to not leverage the power you have into more power, with the aim of making this world more just and safe for everyone.

It’s a high honor to be here. I was here once before in 2022 via video because an oil company had my passport confiscated. I was not allowed to travel outside the United States for seven years. I had been to Ecuador once a month for over 20 years, or over 250 times, trying to hold Chevron accountable for its human rights abuses in the Amazon. From August 2019 until December of 2025 I never left the United States.

My name is Steven Donziger.

I’m an attorney who has worked on one case for 33 years.

During that time I represented Amazon communities in Ecuador against Chevron. Chevron is a company that in addition to wrecking the rainforest with toxic oil waste, works closely with the Israeli government to – in my opinion — essentially steal Palestinian-owned gas off the coast of Gaza and market it commercially to the world.

Chevron, and it’s rapacious appetite for oil and money regardless of the consequences to vulnerable communities, is illustrative of much of what is wrong with corporate power in the world.

To retaliate for my working helping Amazon communities, Chevron manipulated the legal system to make me a corporate political prisoner in the United States for almost three years. It was an act of persecution condemned by the United Nations, multiple judges and bar associations, 68 Nobel laureates, and dozens of US political officials including 34 members of Congress who demanded President Biden pardon me.

I want to explain my experience with the dark “art” of corporate political persecution in a western liberal democracy.

I have represented Amazon communities since 1993 when I took my first trip to Ecuador. On that trip, I witnessed what is probably the worst environmental catastrophe on the planet. Chevron had dumped billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste into the streams and rivers that local communities for millennia had used for their drinking water, bathing, and fishing.

Cancer was everywhere. Doctors were virtually nowhere. People were dying.

The people we talked to had never been in court in their lives. Had never met a lawyer. Did not think they had a right to walk into the local courthouse. We convinced them otherwise.

The case against Chevron was filed in New York. Chevron insisted it be moved to Ecuador’s courts, believing it it could engineer a political dismissal. We spent 10 years fighting over the issue of jurisdiction. Chevron won that battle and the case went to Ecuador on the condition that the company accept jurisdiction there.

I believe Chevron knew at that point that it could not win. So they declared war on the communities and their lawyers through the legal system.

After years of intense litigation involving more than 200,000 pages of evidence, the affected communities in 2011 won the largest environmental judgement ever. Chevron could not accept the fact that Indigenous peoples and humble farming communities had the intelligence and resourcefulness to do such a thing; so they had to attribute all of that success to a “gringo” from the North.

Chevron targeted me with 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers. They persuaded a judge in New York who had investments in Chevron to lock me up in my own apartment in Manhattan, with a battery-charged GPS monitor attached to my ankle all day and night. They used the pretext that I was a “risk of flight” and would flee the country even though I was only charged with a misdemeanor.

I couldn’t ever take the GPS monitor off. Slept with it. Showered with it. Ate with it. It would talk to me remotely. Wake me and my wife Laura up in the middle of the night to tell us to charge it.

The surveillance claw was attached to my body and administered by a private, for-profit corporation that runs several ICE detention centers in the United States. My son Matthew, who is here, spent the main part of his adolescence living with a detained Dad.

For good measure, they also shoved me into a federal prison for six weeks. Once in, I never knew if I’d get out.

Chevron had sued me personally for 60 billion dollars claiming the case was a sham even though it had been affirmed by six different appellate courts, including the Supreme Courts of Ecuador and Canada.

That’s the most amount of money anybody ever has been sued for in history. There’s not a bank, oil company, or insurance company on earth that ever has been sued for so much – and I’m a human rights lawyer working out of the table in my kitchen.

They ultimately took my passport, all of my money, and finally my freedom. I became the first person in history to be prosecuted by an oil company on a contempt of court charge. The United Nations determined my detention was illegal and ordered the US government to pay me compensation. (This order was ignored.)

Obviously this story is long and I am leaving out important details. Obviously I’m free now. They tried to silence me. They tried to get me to jump off the roof of my building. They used me to try to intimidate activists and to undermine environmental advocacy.

They failed on all counts.

So what can we learn from this concept of a corporation directly caging an activist?

I want to say something plainly, because plain language is what this moment requires. The criminal case against me was sort of the canary in the coal mine of what we are seeing now all across the West – in Germany, the UK, Canada, Australia, and so many countries.

The oligarchs have declared war against the activists.

We are living through things the world has not seen before.

First, the United States — a country that spent decades, however imperfectly, presenting itself as a defender of democracy and human rights — has become something else. Under Trump, it has gone from a nation that at least claimed to respect the rule of law to a pariah state actively undermining the global order it once built.

And it is not happening quietly.

In Gaza, we are watching what I can only call an open-book genocide carried out by perpetrators who act as though accountability no longer applies to them — because, increasingly, it doesn’t.

Second, the rule of law, human rights norms, the basic architecture of international accountability — these are being violated in plain sight by the powerful, and nothing happens.

No consequence. No correction. Just the next violation.

Third: At the same time, the climate crisis is not a future threat anymore.

It is actively destroying the conditions for sustained life on this planet, right now. Trump is actively promoting fossil fuels – he just had the US government pay billions to wind companies to take down their turbines. Europe is burning from fires. Millions now die each year from heat and drought. The oil industry is drilling more than ever.

Fourth, the world’s 400 million Indigenous peoples hold 80% of oil, mineral, and gas reserves. The conflict between Indigenous rights and resource extraction is one of the fundamental battles of our generation, yet Indigenous peoples get far too little support and too often the first people targeted.

These are the frontline defenders of the planet. They are the victims of the original genocide in the United States, Canada, and Australia among other places. Their critical role and needs must be centered on all of our platforms.

Fifth: Underneath all of it, corporations have more unchecked power than at any point in history— power that is actively hollowing out our freedom and democracy from the inside. Here is the pattern I want you to actually understand, not just feel: as corporate power grows, repression of progressive activists grows with it. And as popular movements grow stronger in response, the tools built to repress them grow stronger too.

Sixth: Wealth inequality drives so much of this. The need of the oligarchs and the ultra-elites to preserve this system of inequality has created the needs for massive repression. It drives the fossil fuel industry, war, and genocide – and the targeting of people like me.

When their corruption is thrust by us into the open – when too many are hip to their rigged game – they become more naked in their attempt to repress us with their money, soldiers, and power. Which is my mind is a great opportunity for us to build our power in response.

That’s what happened to me on a small scale.

They play by the rules until they lose, at which point they become openly corrupt. This is what got Navalny killed in Russia. It’s what led to my life being threatened in the United States. It’s what led to Julian Assange being locked up for years.

The technique is classic: criminalize those who speak out. Call them “terrorists” while you commit terrorism. Shrink the civic space by scaring the hell out of people – so people stop speaking out.

In the Prairieland case in the state of Texas, which involved a protest at an ICE detention facility, eight defendants were handed exorbitant prison sentences ranging from 30 to 100 years after they were cast as “terrorists”. One man who was not even at the protest was given 30 years for moving a box of literature related to the protest from one location to another.

I believe that under the Trump Administration ICE has become a domestic terrorist organization. So why are those protesting ICE being sentenced as “terrorists”?

Because here’s what few fully reckon with: the propaganda and surveillance apparatus around us is so pervasive that we are already living inside Orwell’s 1984. We just don’t call it that, because it isn’t hooded men and telescreens. It’s an app. It’s a terms-of-service agreement. It’s a camera you paid for yourself. And it’s algorithms that serve corporate profits rather than human needs.

Do you know that the Israeli company NSO Group developed spyware called Pegasus that remotely can be put in your phone. Once in, it can access all of your data, your messages, your calls – and it can secretly activate the camera and microphone even when the phone is turned off. Governments and corporations buy this service to spy on journalists and their political opponents.

How can activists fighting the power structure unwittingly be turned into listening devices for the power structure?

I need you to unlearn something you might have been taught in school: the concept of the law as neutral. It was never neutral. It is, in practice, in every society I have seen whether it be the United States or Cuba or Belgium -- largely a tool that the powerful use to legitimize what they were going to do anyway.

I learned that lesson in a Manhattan courtroom with an ankle bracelet on my leg.

I did not survive that experience to stand up here and hand you despair. Us feeling despair is exactly what this system is counting on. So let me give you what it cost me a great deal to learn — five things that I want you to carry away with you today.

One: leadership is about organizing movements. One person cannot do it alone.

Two: one leader can ignite an entire social justice movement as long as they understand it’s about the movement.

One person, willing to go first. Gandhi was one such person. Mandela. Fidel Castro in 1954 landed in Cuba with 120 armed men intending to overthrow a US-backed dictator. Sixty of the men were killed almost immediately; the rest fled into the mountains with almost no weapons to face a brutal 60,000-person army.

Sixty against 60,000. The movement won.

Think about Greta and what those first school strikes did for the climate and Gaza solidarity movements.

History does not wait for consensus before it starts moving — it waits for someone willing to take the first step alone, and trust that others will follow.

Three: Take the first step and see what happens.

Not the perfect plan. Not the fully-formed strategy. Action. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step — and I want you to actually believe that, not just nod at it. Look at what happened in New York City with Mayor Mamdani. Nobody handed that campaign a guaranteed outcome. Somebody took a step that looked improbable, and then took another one. That is how every movement you admire actually started — not with certainty about the outcome, but with motion.

Four: combine the inner spirit and the outer activism.

This is the one people skip, and it’s the one that keeps you alive to keep fighting. You cannot sustain years of confrontation with power on rage alone — I know, because I tried, and it nearly broke me. You need the outer fire of activism and the inner discipline of peace, together. Not instead of each other. Together. One without the other burns you out or hollows you out. Both together is how you last long enough to actually win.

Five: redefine what it means to win in an asymmetrical environment.

In the world we’re in now, a win is not only when you achieve your objective. A win is also when you stop the other side with its vastly superior resources from achieving theirs. Or slow them down.

Chevron has still not gotten what it wanted from me — my silence, my surrender, my disappearance from this fight. Every day I’m still standing here is a win, even on the days I haven’t gained an inch. Don’t let anyone tell you that only total victory counts. Denying them their victory counts too.

Six: understand both the promise and the limits of the law.

The law can be a genuine tool for justice — I’ve used it to win real victories for real people. But it is not your savior, and it is not neutral, and it will not save you by itself. Use it. Master it if you can. Never worship it. Understand its limitations. And understand it is most effective when used as a component of a larger advocacy strategy across multiple platforms.

I look out at this crowd and I know exactly what some of you are thinking: this is a lot to carry. It is.

But you are not carrying it alone, and you are not carrying it first. People have stood exactly where you’re standing, facing forces that looked exactly this immovable, and moved them anyway. Not because the system corrected itself. Because they refused to disappear.

The powerful are counting on your despair. Don’t give it to them.

Protect your peace while you fight. Redefine winning on your own terms. Build your solidarity. Never, ever allow them to silence you. Take that first step. And keep moving.

Thank you.