Jason Isaac report at The Hill Greenpeace’s attempt to swindle US courts just got harpooned.  Excerpts in italics wtih my bolds and added images.

The North Dakota Supreme Court just drew a bright line for the rule of law, U.S. sovereignty and the energy infrastructure that keeps our country running. On May 7, the court ruled four to one that Greenpeace International cannot use a Dutch court to nullify what a unanimous American jury already decided.

It is a welcome victory, but the fight against eco-lawfare is far from over.

The case began in 2019, when Energy Transfer sued Greenpeace and other activist groups over the coordinated, sometimes violent campaign waged against the Dakota Access Pipeline. After six years of litigation and a three-week trial, twelve North Dakota jurors unanimously found Greenpeace liable for conspiracy, defamation, defamation per se and tortious interference.  The damages exceeded $666 million across the three Greenpeace defendants, with more than $130 million tagged to Greenpeace International alone. The jury heard the evidence and reached its verdict.

That should have been the end of it. It was not.

Two weeks before the North Dakota trial began, after six years of fighting in American courts, Greenpeace International filed a new lawsuit in Amsterdam. The plan was straightforward: ask a Dutch court to declare the North Dakota case “manifestly unfounded and abusive” under a new European Union anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) directive, then use that foreign declaration to erase the verdict and seize Energy Transfer’s assets wherever they could find them. It was a calculated end-run around our judiciary, dressed up in the polite language of European jurisprudence.

The North Dakota Supreme Court saw through it. Justice Jerod Tufte, writing for the majority this month, made the principle clear:

Substance matters, not labels. A claim that requires a foreign court to find an American jury wrong is a collateral attack on that jury, no matter what name the lawyers attach to it.

The court ordered the trial judge to issue a narrowly tailored injunction
blocking Greenpeace from pursuing the parts of its Dutch action
that depend on relitigating what North Dakotans already decided.

The opinion is worth quoting on the point that matters most,  The court wrote,:

“ Comity expires when the strong public policies of the forum
are vitiated by the foreign act.”

In plain English, foreign courts get respect when they earn it. A party that races to Amsterdam on the eve of an American trial to undermine the anticipated verdict cannot then demand that American courts politely defer to the foreign proceeding it manufactured.

This is the right ruling. It is also a narrow one.

The injunction applies to one party in one state. Unfortunately, that means Greenpeace can still pursue the parts of its Dutch action that do not require erasing the North Dakota verdict.

Federal courts have not yet weighed in on whether American courts can block foreign collateral attacks on American judgments. And the federal circuits are split on how heavily international comity should weigh against such injunctions. Other state supreme courts have not taken up the question. The next activist group with a domestic loss and a foreign sympathetic forum will try the same play, just with better lawyers and a cleaner record.

And they have plenty of reasons to keep trying. The European Union’s 2024 anti-SLAPP directive was sold as a shield for journalists and dissidents in countries with weak speech protections. In practice, however, it is becoming a sword aimed at American energy companies that win in court. The directive’s “manifestly unfounded” standard invites foreign judges to second-guess the merits of American court verdicts. Article 17 invites damages claims for the offense of having sued. The architecture is custom-built for the exact tactic Greenpeace attempted.

The deeper problem is that the activist legal industry has discovered something useful. When the protests fail, when the defamation campaigns get punished, when the juries refuse to play along, there is always another forum, another court, another friendly jurisdiction willing to entertain the argument that American energy infrastructure is itself a kind of crime.

The point is not to win on the merits. The point is to make building anything in this country so legally treacherous that capital flees and projects die. This strategy will work in proportion to how seriously American courts take it.

The North Dakota Supreme Court took it seriously. Other courts must follow. Congress should pay attention too. American companies operating under American law, sued in American courts and vindicated by American juries should not have to fight the same case all over again in Amsterdam, Brussels, or anywhere else.

A federal statute clarifying the authority of American courts to block foreign collateral attacks on domestic judgments would put the matter beyond doubt. The Trump administration’s commitment to energy dominance demands nothing less.

The stakes are not abstract. Every data center humming with artificial intelligence, every factory bringing jobs back from overseas, every home heated through a North Dakota winter depends on the ability of American companies to build, operate, and defend the infrastructure that delivers reliable energy. Strip away the certainty that an American verdict actually means something, and that infrastructure becomes a much riskier bet. Risk premiums rise. Capital gets scarcer. Projects do not get built.

Greenpeace lost in North Dakota. It lost again on May 7. This is all good. But the rest of the country needs to make sure those losses stick and continue, because the next case is already being drafted somewhere, and the activists who brought us a six-year siege of the Dakota Access Pipeline are not going to take this defeat as a final answer.  Neither should we.