Can a court in one country really control what’s done in another country’s courtroom?
The decade-long clash between Greenpeace and the American pipeline company Energy Transfer entered a strange new phase this month when a state court in North Dakota barred Greenpeace International, which is based in Europe, from making certain claims against Energy Transfer in a Dutch court.
It’s notable because, of course, North Dakota law doesn’t apply in the Netherlands.
“That’s wild,” said Hannah Buxbaum, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in transnational litigation and has written about the case. It amounts to “indirectly telling that court what it can and cannot consider,” she said. “I can’t think of another situation where I’ve seen something like that.”
Legal experts say that courts do sometimes issue injunctions against filing lawsuits overseas. For example, if a court is hearing a dispute between two companies, it might say those companies can’t simultaneously sue over the same thing in another country, in order to avoid ending up with two conflicting verdicts. This often comes up if a company has violated a previous agreement over where to adjudicate a conflict, Professor Buxbaum said.
But that’s not what happened here.
In this case, the foreign lawsuit had already been filed. And there was already a verdict in North Dakota — and it was a big one.
Last year, Energy Transfer achieved an overwhelming victory against three separate Greenpeace organizations, alleging that they had played a major role in protests against its Dakota Access Pipeline a decade ago. Those protests and other actions had cost Energy Transfer money, the company said, and had defamed it.
A jury agreed. If the verdict stands, the three Greenpeace groups (two based in the United States, and the international one, based in Amsterdam) could collectively be on the hook for $345 million. Greenpeace’s U.S. arm has said the verdict could bankrupt it.
While that legal battle was playing out in North Dakota, Greenpeace International filed its own lawsuit against Energy Transfer in the Netherlands. Its case there argues that Energy Transfer’s legal actions against Greenpeace in North Dakota were illegal because they were designed to silence Greenpeace with the threat of costly litigation.
Cases like these are known as SLAPP, or Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. North Dakota law doesn’t have anti-SLAPP provisions. But Dutch law does. Since Greenpeace International is based in the Netherlands, that raises the possibility that Greenpeace might use the Dutch court as a way of recouping legal costs and damages from the North Dakota case.
Energy Transfer asked the North Dakota court to force Greenpeace to withdraw its Dutch lawsuit and took its fight all the way up to the state’s Supreme Court.
In its ruling this month, the Supreme Court didn’t go as far as Energy Transfer had asked — it didn’t call for Greenpeace to withdraw its Dutch lawsuit. However, it ordered the North Dakota trial court to reverse an earlier decision and issue an injunction to block Greenpeace from pursuing any claim in the Netherlands that the North Dakota trial lacked legal foundation or was “manifestly unfounded.”
In its decision, the North Dakota Supreme Court said that the injunction was necessary because the state’s court system has “the duty and the authority to protect the integrity of its own proceedings.”
Greenpeace International said it was undeterred and would press on with the case. It said it would revise the suit to focus on other allegations, including that Energy Transfer’s case was abusive, if not “manifestly unfounded,” as well as out-of-court defamation and claims over a previously dismissed federal lawsuit.
The court’s order was “an inconvenience, but it’s not a showstopper,” said Daniel Simons, Greenpeace International’s senior legal counsel for strategic defense. The group has also submitted a petition to the North Dakota Supreme Court to reconsider the injunction.
Judges generally use foreign anti-suit injunctions sparingly in an effort not to interfere with other nations’ legal systems. When they do use them, the orders are directed toward litigants rather than a court.
But in the North Dakota case, there had never been any agreement between the parties about where to resolve the matter. In fact, Greenpeace International, the Amsterdam-based group, had argued years earlier that the North Dakota courts lacked jurisdiction over it because Greenpeace International has no links to the state. The group has maintained that its only connection to the protests was signing on to an open letter to prospective financiers of the pipeline.
Greenpeace International argues that the North Dakota courts never fully grappled with their arguments over jurisdiction. That issue was central in the group’s recent petition to the Supreme Court requesting a rehearing on the injunction.
Greenpeace International has also said that it should be allowed to argue in the Netherlands that some of Energy Transfer’s claims against it — including ones like trespassing — were, in fact, “manifestly unfounded.” The group was found liable for conspiracy, defamation and tortious interference with business, but not the trespassing and other claims.
Still, Mr. Simons said Greenpeace International would heed the injunction as long as it remained in place, rather than risk a contempt-of-court order.
Jorge Contreras, a law professor at the University of Utah who has also written about anti-suit injunctions, said that a contempt judgment could potentially affect the American or Dutch Greenpeace organizations. Contempt is prosecuted as both a civil and criminal matter, raising the stakes to the highest level. “People go to jail for contempt of court, and the fines can be extremely high,” he said. In one recent example, a Chinese company was fined $1 million a day by an American court for violating an anti-suit injunction.
And Greenpeace International’s staff members could be at risk of arrest even though they are based in Europe, Professor Contreras said. “If there’s a criminal contempt judgment against them, and any of them ever steps foot into the United States, they could easily be arrested” upon arrival, he said. “U.S. law enforcement is not shy about doing this, about arresting foreign executives as soon as they step foot into a U.S. airport, even if it’s literally just a layover.”
Energy Transfer has also argued directly to the Amsterdam District Court that the Greenpeace International case there should be halted. That court is expected to rule on the matter on June 3.
Matthieu Dhenne, a French academic and patent litigator, said the Greenpeace case was a stark departure from the normal circumstances around cross-border anti-suit injunctions because the dispute involved matters such as environmental activism and freedom of expression.
“The issue is not whether Greenpeace ultimately wins or loses,” he said, but whether protracted legal battles like this are essentially a way to silence a critic given the legal costs that can pile up. He referred to that as a “procedural asymmetry” that could act as a deterrent against speaking out.
Greenpeace International had announced that it was filing the anti-SLAPP case in a Dutch court nearly two years ago, before the North Dakota trial started. Once the Dutch case was officially filed in July 2025, Energy Transfer immediately petitioned Judge James D. Gion, who oversaw the trial in Mandan, N.D., to issue the anti-suit injunction to stop it. Judge Gion declined to do so, citing case law that counseled a conservative approach to the matter.
Energy Transfer then asked the North Dakota Supreme Court to force Judge Gion to reverse his decision, arguing that the Dutch lawsuit was “an affront to North Dakota’s sovereignty.”
A majority of the judges concurred. The opinion noted that it was a novel question for them. The court had never previously ruled on the propriety of an international anti-suit injunction.
But the chief justice, Lisa K. Fair McEvers, dissented from the opinion. One of her arguments was that if the lower court was required to issue the injunction, “it should first determine whether the facts presented at trial support a finding of personal jurisdiction.”
“Without such a finding, the court has no authority to issue the injunction,” she wrote.
Trey Cox of the law firm Gibson Dunn, who represents Energy Transfer, said the company appreciated the court’s “careful decision” and that it protected the verdict “from an improper end run abroad.”
With the $345 million verdict hanging over their heads, all three Greenpeace defendants in the North Dakota case have asked Judge Gion for a new trial, arguing the previous one was flawed and unfair. If that is denied, they will file an appeal.
Meantime, the pipeline that was at the center of the protests a decade ago has been operating since 2017. Last week, it was granted a final easement by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Karen Zraick covers legal affairs for the Climate desk and the courtroom clashes playing out over climate and environmental policy.
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