>From www.monde-diplomatique.fr/en/2000/07/15asbestos
}}>Begin
July 2000
Contents
Morocco: the point of change
Nato on trial
Was the Serbian TV station really a legitimate target? *
The protection of civilians
International law's highest standards
Armed peace in the Middle East *
Syria: the rise and rise of Doctor Bashar *
Peru: pacified but not peaceful *
Authoritarian rule not denied
Haiti's last chance *
The Aristide decade
Ethiopia invades Eritrea *
Conflict in the Horn of Africa
The Sultanate of the Philippines *
The asbestos conspiracy
Africa defies licences for life *
Protection or exclusion
'Do you know the way to San Jose?' *
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(*) Star-marked articles are restricted to subscribers only. See subscription
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CANADA V FRANCE: WTO RULES
The asbestos conspiracy
Even though it is nearly 40 years since asbestos was scientifically shown to cause
cancer and it has now claimed thousands of lives, the WTO is examining a complaint by
Canada, which exports 99% of its output, against Fra
nce, which banned it in 1997. The WTO's Dispute Settlement Body is quite capable of
finding in favour of the purveyors of death and the governments that so shamelessly
support them, since it habitually puts "freedom" for
trade before any other consideration. Since the outrageous ruling on hormone-
treated beef, anything seems possible.
by PATRICK HERMAN and ANNIE TH�BAUD-MONY
The World Trade Organisation's Dispute Settlement Body (DSB), the source of its
strong arm tactics, operates anonymously, in secret and behind closed doors.
The WTO first came to prominence for its regrettable judgement against the
European Union for refusing to import hormone-treated meat from the United
States into France. The ruling provoked a chain reaction starting with
initiatives by the roquefort cheese producers of Aveyron in France. Now, with
no more publicity, the DSB is preparing to rule on a Canadian complaint
challenging the French decision to ban asbestos, in force since 1 January 1997.
Again, it is acting in the name of freedom for international trade.
It was on 28 May 1998 that Ottawa initiated dispute proceedings against France.
That was when the battle of experts began. It is taking place far away from the
countless victims who have already experienced the effects of asbestos first
hand. On the one hand, we have Canada, Zimbabwe and Russia, producers for whom
asbestos is a strategic industry. On the other, stands France, backed by the
EU, which adopted a directive banning the trade in and use of asbestos in July
1999, although it will not become effective everywhere until 2005 (at the
latest). Now, only three member states, Spain, Greece and Portugal, have still
to implement it. Paris has the support of the US, which considers all types of
asbestos carcinogenic. What is at stake with the DSB's "judgement" has to be
understood in the light of the war that has set the asbestos industry lobby
against the deadly fibre's millions of victims for the last hundred years.
Between 1930 and 1960, manufacturers did all they could to prevent the link
between asbestos and respiratory diseases, including cancer, becoming known, so
they could avoid prosecution. American workers had in fact sued the Johns
Manville company as far back as 1932, but it was not until 1962 that
epidemiologists finally established beyond any doubt what company bosses had
known for a long time - asbestos causes cancer (1). That was when the
conspiracy of silence began all round the world. In South Africa, researcher
Christopher Wagner was unable to find a publisher for his work on mesothelioma
and in the end published his findings in Great Britain (2). In 1987 Dr Bogden
Przygocki posted information about the dangers of asbestos at the Gdansk
shipyard in Poland. He did so without permission and was sacked from the
shipyard's clinic.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the polemic shifted to the international
organisations. In the guise of "official" reports by the World Health
Organisation and the International Labour Office, industry "experts" tried to
get two messages endorsed as scientific truth: first that white asbestos
(chrysotile) is not very toxic, if at all (3), and secondly that its
"controlled use" is possible. These attempts failed, thanks to pressure from
researchers unconnected with the manufacturers, who denounced the way
international organisations were being used by the lobbies (4). But the said
"experts" nevertheless still enjoyed some legitimacy and continued to spread
their message in order to "reassure" the expanding markets in the countries of
the South, carefully avoiding any confrontation with the victims, who were
never asked for their side of the story.
Governments and public opinion were also manipulated in other ways. In Brazil,
for example, academics, who also acted as medical consultants to the firms
concerned, carried out epidemiological studies under conditions incompatible
with the demands of scientific rigour (5). This was true of the identification
of former workers exposed to asbestos (60% of Brazilian workers are
unregistered), diagnosis (a third of the population has no access to health
care) or measuring the relationship between dose and effect (without knowing
precisely how much people were exposed to). In this way, Brazilian chrysotile
was "proved" to be harmless.
These supposedly "scientific" practices went hand in hand with a world media
offensive. In France, the Standing Committee on Asbestos (CPA), an informal
body formed by a media consultancy in 1982, brought together manufacturers,
scientists, public authorities and trade unions (6). The press consulted the
CPA before anyone else, since it was the "expert" that could not be ignored,
constantly singing the praises of the "controlled use of asbestos". It was not
until 1995 (7) that the scandal broke and the CPA vanished as mysteriously as
it had appeared. But that did not prevent Claude All�gre, the French minister
for education, research and technology, from denouncing the "intellectual
terrorism" he claimed held sway on the Jussieu university campus in Paris, from
which all asbestos was ordered to be removed. His conclusion was that "some
kind of mass psychosis had transformed a minor problem into a major hazard"
(8).
The Canadian government and manufacturers, for their part, offered foreign
journalists and trade unionists trips to the Thetford Mines in Quebec - tourist
trips to the land of no-risk asbestos. There was humanitarian aid as well. The
1976 Guatemala earthquake gave Eternit's local subsidiary, Duralit, the
opportunity to supply asbestos cement roofing, paid for out of charity
collections. In 1991 a memorandum of understanding was even signed between the
UN High Commission for Refugees and the Belgian multinational Etex. The first
"customers" were not slow in coming: Croatia, Guatemala and Rwanda-Burundi.
The asbestos victims' counterattack took place before the law. Legal
proceedings uncovered the tragedies of victims and their families, the criminal
practices of employers, and the authorities' culpable failure to act. All this
gave the scandal a real political dimension.
In the US, the "trial of the century", with nearly 300,000 complaints filed,
ended abruptly: Johns Mansville declared itself bankrupt in August 1982 and set
up a compensation fund, followed by other manufacturers and their insurance
companies. But the number of victims was so great that the fund was quickly
exhausted.
In France, the National Association for the Defence of Victims of Asbestos
(Andeva) has brought more than 1,000 civil or criminal actions from 1996 (9).
Both the system for preventing or compensating for occupational diseases and
the relevant institutions, especially industrial medicine, were on trial with
them.
Protest movement
In Brazil, which is currently the world's fifth largest producer, Eternit and
Saint-Gobain were helped in their asbestos operations by the military
dictatorship, which censored all information about occupational health and
industrial hazards (10). At the instigation of the Brazilian Association of
Workers Exposed to Asbestos (Abrea), formed in 1997, hundreds of workers (or
families of deceased victims) went to court. In 1998, Eternit was ordered to
compensate a former employee. Eternit and Brasilit (Saint-Gobain's Brazilian
subsidiary) then offered their former employees an amicable agreement whereby
workers would refrain from bringing proceedings in exchange for a lump sum
compensation in the event of illness.
S�o Paolo labour inspector, Fernanda Giannasi, denounced these agreements
publicly and they were twice declared invalid by the Brazilian courts. The
inspector was prosecuted by Eternit for slander, provoking a massive national
and international outcry. Eternit's case was dismissed and it decided not to
appeal. Later this year, Brazil may decide to ban asbestos with effect from the
year 2005 (as under the European directive).
Last year in London, nearly 2,000 black workers from the South African mines
brought an action against their former employer, the British firm Cape Ltd. It
responded with a press campaign taken up by rightwing newspapers denouncing the
"outrageous cost" to the British taxpayer of compensating these "foreign
miners".
Canada, which exports 99% of its production, has been engaged in intensive
diplomatic activity. At an international seminar organised by the Brazilian
ministry of labour in 1994, its ambassador told seven ministers of his
government's concern over an agreement between the Brazilian state, management
and labour for the phasing out of asbestos in friction materials. In 1997 the
Canadian embassy in Seoul persuaded the Korean government to withdraw labelling
drawing attention to the dangers of imported Canadian asbestos. In Europe,
Ottawa has been stepping up the pressure following the French ban. And not
without success: Anthony Blair delayed the ban recommended by the British
public health authorities for two years in return for Canada's support in the
"mad cow" crisis.
But the 1990s saw the birth of social movements against asbestos in many
countries. The diversity of their membership: associations, researchers,
lawyers, health professionals and trade unions, makes them extremely dynamic.
Their international growth is also explained by the ways in which they
cooperate. Rather than reproduce the traditional North-South relationship, they
share experiences and information and assist one another in the social
struggles in their respective countries. They make wide use of virtual
communication networks, but they are based above all on human ties of
solidarity.
By reducing the right to health to "technical provisions", the WTO's
arbitration shifts the legitimacy of it from the political arena to that of
scientific and technocratic expertise, beyond all democratic control. In a
study (11) carried out for the Trade Union Technical Bureau, Saman Zia-Zarifi
and Mary Footer show that, even if the DSB's decision does not call into
question the French decision to ban asbestos, the very proceedings are bringing
human health and workplace safety within the remit of the WTO although they had
hitherto been matters for national sovereignty.
Apart from the criteria to which it refers, especially the primacy of free
trade, this procedure gives established "experts" alone the right to tell the
"truth" in the name of science. But only the victims' knowledge of the dangers
of asbestos can fully reveal the human scale of the risk. And they are also the
only ones not consulted in the WTOs' dispute settlement procedure.
If the WTO's competence is not categorically challenged in areas relating to
citizenship, or even simple dignity, then the principles of law developed in
the course of human history - the right to life and health, the right to safety
at work, the right for the natural environment to be preserved for future
generations - will themselves become subservient to the overriding criterion of
free trade. Will the strategy so cleverly and cynically followed by the
asbestos industry for a hundred years win out in this way?
* Journalist and research director at the French National Institute for Health
and Medical Research (Inserm) respectively, and co-ordinators of the
international Ban Asbestos Network.
(1) David Lilienfield, "The silence: the Asbestos Industry and Early
Occupational Cancer Research. A Case Study", American Journal of Public Health,
June 1991, vol. 81, No. 6.
(2) British Journal of Industrial Medicine, Vol. 17, 260-271, 1960.
(3) Chrysotile accounts for over 90% of the asbestos mined throughout the
world, the other varieties being banned in most of the major industrialised
countries.
(4) Barry Castleman, Richard Lemen, "The manipulation of the international
organisations", International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health,
vol. 4, No. 1, January-March 1998.
(5) Estudo Epidemiologico em trabalhadores espostos ao asbesto na atividade de
fibro-cemento; na atividade da minera��o, projects co-ordinated by professor
Ericson Bagatin, University of Campinas, Brazil, August 1996.
(6) Fran�ois Malye, Amiante, le dossier de l'air contamin�, Le Pr�-aux-Clercs/
Sciences et Avenir, Paris, 1996.
(7) See "L'h�ritage empoisonn� de l'amiante", Le Monde, 31 May 1995, and
"Mortel amiante, une �pid�mie qui nous concerne tous", Sciences et Avenir, June
1995.
(8) See Claude All�gre, "Amiante, o� est le scandale?", Le Point, 19 October
1986.
(9) Andeva, 22, rue des Vignerons, 94686 Vincennes Cedex.
(10) Annie Th�baud-Mony, L'Envers des soci�t�s industrielles. Approche
comparative franco-br�silienne, L'Harmattan, Paris, 1990.
(11) Saman Zia-Zarifi and Mary Footer, Report for the TUTB/ETUC on European
Communities Measures Affecting Asbestos and Products Containing Asbestos,
Department of International Law/Glodis Institute, Erasmus University,
Rotterdam, December 1999.
Translated by Malcolm Greenwood
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED � 1997-2000 Le Monde diplomatique
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The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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