ICC: we need an International Environment Court too
June 2nd, 2010The two current big environmental disasters say it all. BP has contaminated huge stretches of the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana, and now its shares have lost a third of their value (a fall of $40bn), the company is subject to an ‘aggressive’ criminal investigation led by the US Government, and there is serious talk that BP (the third largest corporation in the US) could be broken by this environmental catastrophe.
Trafigura, a UK oil trader, it is now revealed, tried to get rid of hundreds of tonnes of oil wastes in the Netherlands by concealing how dangerous these wastes were, failed, had to pump it all back on board its tanker, and then ‘dumped it over the fence’ in the outshirts of Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire – only now to face criminal charges in Amsterdam because it misled the authorities by claiming the toxic wastes were routine ‘slops’ from tank cleaning.
The scandal of both these incidents is that if they had occurred anywhere else except in the US of EU, the oil companies would have got away with it. BP’s and Shell’s ravages in Africa particularly, but also in the Middle East and Asia, are regularly done with impunity while Trafigura’s poisoning of thousands of Africans goes unpunished (apart from very modest compensation) even today. So what should be done? (more…)
