After sixteen years of proceedings, the justice rendered a decision of final dismissal, Thursday, January 5, in the case of chlordecone. Used for decades in Guadeloupe and Martinique against the banana weevil, this organochlorine pesticide has poisoned the environment and is suspected of causing numerous diseases within the population.
The two Parisian investigating judges in charge of the procedure thus followed the indictment of the Paris prosecutor’s office, delivered at the end of November.
This dismissal of high symbolic value was feared by elected officials and inhabitants of Martinique and Guadeloupe, who denounce a risk of ” miscarriage of justice ” and should appeal this decision.
According to elements of the dismissal order of which Agence France-Presse was aware, the two investigating magistrates recognize a “health scandal”in the form of’“an environmental attack whose human, economic and social consequences affect and will affect the daily life of the inhabitants for many years” from Martinique and Guadeloupe. They nevertheless pronounced a dismissal, evoking the difficulty of “report the criminal evidence of the facts denounced”, “committed ten, fifteen or thirty years before the filing of complaints”the first having been made in 2006.
The magistrates also point out “the state of technical or scientific knowledge” when the facts were committed: “the bundle of scientific arguments” in the early 1990s “did not make it possible to say that the certain causal link required by criminal law” between the substance in question and the impact on health “was established”.
Also putting forward various obstacles related to the law, its interpretation and its evolution since the time of the use of chlordecone, the magistrates, while saying their ” worry “ to get a “judicial truth”concluded that it was impossible to “characterize a criminal offence”.
More than 90% of the adult population of the two islands contaminated
Used in banana plantations to fight against the weevil, chlordecone was authorized in Martinique and Guadeloupe until 1993, under derogation, when the rest of French territory had banned its use. It caused significant and long-lasting pollution of the two islands and is suspected of having caused a wave of cancers.
He was only banned from the West Indies fifteen years after warnings from the World Health Organization. According to Public Health France, more than 90% of the adult population of the two islands is contaminated by this pesticide.
In 2006, several Martinican and Guadeloupean associations had filed a complaint for poisoning, endangering the lives of others and administration of harmful substances. Judicial information had been opened at the Paris judicial court in 2008. In its dismissal requisitions, the Paris public prosecutor’s office had considered that the facts were prescribed, in particular with regard to poisoning, or not characterized, concerning the administration of harmful substances, which prevents any prosecution.
Since the announcement of the dismissal requisitions, demonstrations and gatherings have multiplied in Martinique.