NEW YORK – A New York jury has found that French banking giant BNP Paribas’s activities in Sudan helped support the regime of former ruler Omar al-Bashir, making the bank liable for atrocities committed under his rule.
The eight-member jury on Friday sided with three plaintiffs originally from Sudan, awarding a total of USD 20.75 million in damages after hearing testimony describing atrocities committed by Sudanese soldiers and the Popular Defence Forces — the government-linked militia known as the Janjaweed. The plaintiffs — two men and one woman, all now American citizens — told the federal court in Manhattan that they had been tortured, burned with cigarettes, slashed with a knife, and, in the woman’s case, sexually assaulted. “I have no relatives left,” Entesar Osman Kasher told the court.
The trial focused on whether BNP Paribas’s financial services were a “natural and adequate cause” of the harm suffered by survivors of ethnic cleansing and mass violence in Sudan. A spokesperson for BNP Paribas said in a statement to the AFP news agency that the ruling “is clearly wrong and there are very strong grounds to appeal the verdict.”
Bobby DiCello, who represented the plaintiffs, called the verdict “a victory for justice and accountability.” “The jury recognised that financial institutions cannot turn a blind eye to the consequences of their actions,” DiCello said.
“Our clients lost everything to a campaign of destruction fuelled by USD— a campaign that BNP Paribas facilitated and that should have been stopped,” he added. BNP Paribas “supported the ethnic cleansing and ruined the lives of these three survivors,” DiCello said during his closing remarks on Thursday. (Aljazeera)
