People’s tribunal is on a roll

Activists, farmers and scores of others rejoiced as the seven-member jury of the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) delivered its verdict after three days of deliberations, on Monday evening.

The Tribunal, the first such to be held in India, called for more responsibility on part of six agrochemical transnational corporations.

It recommended action to restructure international laws to make corporations more accountable. There should be lesser burden on victims to provide proof, the jury stressed.

“If there is negligence, omission, bad faith, deliberate intent, then the other side has to defend itself. Statements that it is an act or that nobody could control are not enough. Companies cannot make fancy defence,” said Upendra Baxi, a member of the jury, giving the example of the Bhopal Gas tragedy.

During the tribunal, the jury heard 19 witnesses; four technical witnesses and 15 survivors who substantiated the allegations made in an indictment by the Pesticide Action Network International.

The indictment said that “agrochemical transnational companies have committed and continue to commit with impunity violations of the right to life and health by directly causing death, injury and chronic and irreversible impacts on health. Their products continue to destroy the environment.”

The jury heard 25 cases against the ‘big six’ of the pesticide industry. These related to endosulfan poisoning, Monsanto’s genetically engineered crops, poisoning of the Arctic region, child labour in India, Bayer’s pesticides killing bees across the world, harassment of scientists, Syngenta’s illegal field experiments of GE soy and corn, paraquat poisoning in Malaysia and pesticide stockpiles in Africa.

Like other PPTs, India’s first, too, reiterated the need to intensify action to protect human rights. The definition of rights, too, is not what the law says but what the people say, Baxi said. Suffering people are the original authors of human rights, the right to be human, the right to remain human, the right to say ‘I cannot be a site of experimentation,’ the members of the jury said.

Double standards regarding the usage of pesticides cannot be tolerated. “If you consider a substance harmful to your own people, you should not be allowing your corporations to manufacture it and export it,” Baxi said.

Pesticides manufactured by Germany-based Bayer are banned in the country, but continue to be used in other parts of Europe. The population of bees has declined by 40% to 60% across the world owing to the use of these neonicotinoid pesticides.

The verdict was significant not only from the human rights perspective but also because environmental issues were put into it, said Mimkes.