An international opinion tribunal, which probes and gives judgements relating to human rights violations, has indicted six transnational companies after a four-day public hearing held in Bengaluru this month. The Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT), pronounced its verdict on December 6 against the six largest agrochemical companies—BASF, Bayer, Syngenta, Monsanto, Dow Chemicals and Dupont—for violating people's social, economic, health and cultural rights in India and elsewhere. The decision came after two years of intense work of gathering and documenting cases.
The six-member jury headed by Upendra Baxi, professor of law at Warwick University in the UK, gave the decision. The tribunal's session from December 3 to 6 was held on the request of the Pesticides Action Network (PAN), an international network of NGOs, which had asked the tribunal in 2008 to investigate how activities of the transnational corporations (TNCs) were causing "massive deaths, terrible harm to health, plunder of the environment and destruction of ecological balance and biodiversity".
During the public hearing, PPT was presented with technical reports and individual testimonies on the themes which had been brought to its attention. These included a range of violations of human rights by the different actors (TNCs, states and international agencies): threat to food sovereignty, health implications because of the failure to control dangerous pesticides, complicity between TNCs, national governments and the scientific community. The tribunal also looked into the violation of rights of women and children and qualified the facts with respect to international law convention, treaties and instruments.
Agrochemicals kill 355,000 people each year
The tribunal studied and held cross examination in cases such as that of Silvino Talavera, a 11-year-old from Paraguay who died in 2003 days after breathing in a cloud of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide sprayed by a crop duster. They also studied the casualty and adverse health impact of the pesticide endosulfan on people of Kasaragod district in Kerala state in India and the Bhopal gas leak tragedy.