Puppet Masters
The world's major agrochemical companies, Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, Syngenta, DuPont and BASF, will face a public tribunal in early December accused of systematic human rights violations.
They are accused of violating more than 20 instruments of international human rights law through promoting reliance on the sale and use of dangerous and unsafe pesticides including endosulfan, paraquat and neonicotinoids.
The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal (PPT), an international opinion tribunal created in 1979, will hear expert testimony from scientists, medical doctors and lawyers to prove the charges. Victims who have been injured by these products - from farmers, farmworkers, mothers and consumers from around the world - will also testify to the causes and nature of their injuries.
The cases will be heard over a four-day trial in Bangalore, India beginning December 3. While the Tribunal has no legal weight, and cannot force sanctions on companies, it aims to expose and raise awareness of large-scale human rights violations.
Pesticides Action Network (PAN) International, a global network comprised of 600 organizations in 90 countries, has spent years collecting information to bring about the indictments and is seeking justice for more than 25 specific cases - such as Silvino Talavera, an 11-year-old from Paraguay who died days after breathing in a cloud of Monsanto's RoundUp herbicide sprayed by a crop duster. The trial will also hear evidence of the link between pesticide use and a decline in bees.
The corporations, known as the 'Big 6' control 74 per cent of the global pesticide market, as well as dominating the global seed market.
Bayer rejects the allegations saying they are a 'wholesale distortion of the role of pesticides in our society.' Monsanto, Syngenta and Dow, after being contacted by the Ecologist, were unavailable for comment.
Pesticide poisonings
An estimated 355,000 people are believed to die each year from unintentional toxic chemical poisoning, according the World Health Organization, many of these from use or exposure to pesticides and other agrochemicals. Nick Mole from PAN UK said the trial would give a voice to the otherwise voiceless victims of pesticides.
'The pesticide industry is massive and incredibly powerful. It is difficult to prove corporate manslaughter even when these products are killing hundreds of people a year,' he said. 'We've spoken to people who have been abused and we are allowing them to give voice to their individual stories. We will be presenting the outcome of the Tribunal to the corporations and will be inviting their response,' he said.
It is hoped that the verdict, to be delivered on December 6, will lead to greater discussions at UN institutions on holding agrochemical corporations accountable for crimes relating to the impact of their products.
The PPT grew out of the work by Italian Senator Lelio Basso, and serves as a grassroots, ad hoc court to consider charges and to issue verdicts on complaints of human rights violations submitted by victims or their representative groups.
Since 1979, the PPT has held 35 sessions exposing various forms of human rights abuses in cases from the Bhopal disaster, Tibet sovereignty and the intervention of the US in Nicaragua.
Useful link
Pesticide Action Network UK
Reader Comments
It's about regaining control of our lives.
Moving out from underneath the control of these giant companies will not happen overnight. This tribunal is just a part of the process. Its actual power is like a slingshot against a spaceship. But if you could coordinate a million slingshots to fire together, that might get noticed.
Ultimately, we have to convince farmers and governments to stop doing business with these criminal groups. The only other solution is to declare them to be criminal groups and force them to cease their practices.
The first step is to raise awareness.
and then replace the FDA and EPA. Its not only the the agrochemical companies who are destroying our earth and making in uninhabitable its also the the mining and pharmecuetical companies. We need to start somewhere, we need to make the decision NOW, if we wait any longer our world and the legacy we leave our children will be poisoned. SOW (Save Our World) and sow the seeds of life!
If the highest court in the US decide that corporations and big business orgs were as entities that could in effect vote and take political decision then they are part of the human biological structure which makes the entity responsible under law to the law and consequent courts action for carrying out an environmental act of desecration/poisoning consciously for the purpose of profit - a company is a company is a company of non biological status it is abiotic - but since the supreme court has decided that corps and big biz are entities they have in effect become biotic and thus conscious of their actions and thus cognizant.... and therefore liable in their entireties to the laws which they, like any individual citizen are required to observe and consequently be penalized under where proven to be guilty.!!!
Its about Time!!!