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What Happens When Courts Don't Work - The Bhopal Disaster

By Joe Consumer

Want to hear a tragic story about a man-made disaster caused by a foreign corporation? Let?s Google Earth over to Bhopal India for a moment, where Union Carbide Corporation (now owned by Dow Chemical) caused the world?s worst industrial accident over 25 years ago.  Tens of thousands of people were killed, hundreds of thousands were sickened and blinded, a hundred thousand are still sick. 

You may have missed it, but just this week, an Indian court finally convicted seven former employees of Union Carbide for negligence.  As the UK Times put it, ?the sentences given were no harsher than those for causing a fatal car accident. It seems unlikely that they will serve any time in jail.?  Plenty of people are outraged.  And of course, the one who really should have been held to account but never will is Union Carbide?s then Chairman and CEO Warren Anderson.  He was actually arrested at the time, granted bail ? and then fled to the U.S. as a fugitive, never to set foot in India again.

Note that the civil case to compensate the victims ended even more tragically in 1999, when the company settled for a paltry sum of $470 million, with a release of all further liability.  This was despite efforts to try to bring the civil case to the United States given that this was the fault of a U.S. corporation.  Instead, the case was sent back to India, a country with an extremely weak civil justice system.  

The Guardian had a great editorial about all of this, which sure makes one think:

What is going on in the Gulf of Mexico today is an example of Newton's third law of motion: for every action by BP there is an equal and opposite reaction by the federal government in Washington. The result is that BP is, rightly, being held to account for cleaning up the biggest oil pollution in US history. But just imagine if the blowout on the drilling rig had caused not 11 but up to 25,000 US deaths; that the compensation Washington finally accepted fell far short of that required even to cover the medical bills of the survivors; that 26 years on , BP had still to clean up the site of the accident which was poisoning the local water supply; and that Britain refused to extradite to a US court the main BP executives responsible.

Unthinkable? Well, that is how the US multinational Union Carbide Corporation, now owned by Dow Chemical, has behaved since it created the world's worst industrial disaster at Bhopal in central India. ?

Dow Chemical continues to claim that an agreement with the Indian government under which they paid $470m in compensation resolves all outstanding legal issues. Union Carbide continues to deny responsibility for a plant "designed, owned, operated and managed" by its subsidiary Union Carbide India Ltd. Union Carbide's former chairman Warren Anderson refuses to return to India to face the charges against him. And the people of Bhopal continue to suffer ? from respiratory and kidney problems, cancer, disfigurement, and stunted growth.

Full post as published by ThePopTort on June 08, 2010 (boomark / email).