Oil giant BP has failed to have a private environmental prosecution against it withdrawn and will have to wait until May next year to plead to criminal charges – or to argue that it cannot be prosecuted, says a Mail & Guardian Online report. BP this week told the Gauteng High Court (Pretoria) that it had as much right to a fair and swift criminal prosecution as any other accused and – if prosecutors were not ready to proceed – then the charges against it should be withdrawn.

While those charges hang over its head ‘our reputation will be marred, people will speculate about the morality, the criminality of BP, at the instigation of a prosecutor that is not ready’, Advocate Mike Hellens told the court. But in a complex set of rulings, Judge Brian Spilg said that neither BP nor the prosecutor could be allowed to dictate the pace of proceedings. Instead, Spilg laid out a detailed timeline culminating in a May date by which BP will either plead to charges or have the opportunity to argue why it should not face them at all.

If the prosecution proceeds, it will be a landmark case in SA legal and environmental history: the first private criminal prosecution of alleged environmental crimes, notes the Mail & Guardian Online report. It points out private criminal prosecutions are theoretically possible in SA, but notoriously hard to achieve. Environmental legislation, however, specifically tries to enable civil society to assist in its enforcement. In terms of those more permissive rules, little-known environmental group Uzani has secured the ability to prosecute as many as 2 500 alleged environmental crimes by a range of large companies, between them potentially worth many billions in fines and damages. Top of Uzani’s list: BP’s failure to gain environmental clearance before building petrol stations in a four-year period starting in 1998. BP subsequently paid administrative fines to rectify that breach, something it is likely to argue means it would suffer double jeopardy if it is now also criminally prosecuted. Uzani, on the other hand, has already argued that sorting out paperwork after the fact does not undo a criminal act – and building a petrol station without environmental clearance is a criminal act.

Full Mail & Guardian Online report