Two-year fight for justice over Darwin Harbour oil spill ends with a whimper as charges dismissed

A LONG-running fight for justice over a massive oil spill in Darwin Harbour has ended with a whimper after the charges were dismissed while the alleged offenders remain at large overseas

Darwin Harbour was the site of an oil spill that spread along 30km of coastline in 2016

• Government has three months to find shipmaster allegedly responsible for oil spill
• Court battle over Darwin Harbour oil spill continues to bounce around Territory courts

A TWO-YEAR fight for justice over a massive oil spill in Darwin Harbour has ended with a whimper after the charges were dismissed while the alleged offenders remain at large overseas.

The NT Environment Department charged those allegedly responsible for the spill in 2018, two years after the event, with the case bouncing around the Territory’s courts ever since.

Ship’s master Ferdinand Perete Gardon and managing company Ocean Shipmanagement Ltd were each charged with damaging the environment but neither were able to be summonsed to face court as they were out of the country.

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The dispute returned to the Darwin Local Court for the final time on Friday after an earlier ruling in the Supreme Court found the lower court had no power to force them to face justice.

Government lawyer Michelle Taylor said the department had tried to contact Gardon in Singapore and the Philippines and Ocean Shipmanagement in Greece but had received no response.

“The only option available to my client is to request that the master voluntarily submit to the jurisdiction with a view to resolving these proceedings so that he could enter this jurisdiction as a master freely in the future if he wished to do so,” she said.

But Ms Taylor agreed with judge John Neill that the prospect of that happening was “vanishingly remote” and Mr Neill dismissed the charges, despite the lack of any explicit power of the court to do so.

“This leaves the court in a position of either kicking these files down the road again and again until everyone grows too exhausted and somebody will withdraw the proceedings or my finding some way around the procedural conundrum,” he said.

“I’m of the view that the power of the Local Court to proceed with criminal proceedings of this nature necessarily implies a power of the Local Court, in appropriate circumstances, to dismiss such proceedings.”

The Territory Government changed the law in February in a bid to avoid a similar costly and fruitless legal saga in future and Keep Top End Coasts Healthy spokeswoman Adele Pedder said the amendments would better enable the Territory to pursue justice for marine pollution going forward.

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“Legal protection for our marine and coastal environments is essential to ensure the owners of ships and all operators on the harbour act with respect and are held to account,” she said.

“This is particularly important in Darwin where we are seeing significant increases in industrial activity and associated shipping.”

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