Today Amnesty International released a report on the illegal dumping of toxic waste by Trafigura in 2006 in Cote d'Ivoire and called for a full inquiry into the matter. For those who haven't heard of Trafigura, it's a Dutch multinational which trades commodities and in this case had leased a ship to move waste to a legal processing facility in Amsterdam.
When the processing facility realised the waste was actually rather toxic they upped the price for taking it. Understandably wanting to pocket as much profit as possible, Trafigura decided to try elsewhere. The ship sailed from Amsterdam and made its way down the West African coast looking for a port to dump the waste but got rejected everywhere until it reached Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire. Trafigura made a deal with a newly formed waste processing company and here, rather than processing the waste, it was simply dumped. Since then over 100,000 have received medical treatment for illnesses attributed to the effects of the waste and 12 people are believed to have died as a result of exposure.
In 2007 Trafigura reached an out of court settlement with the government of Cote d'Ivoire which bought it immunity from further prosecution. Since then Trafigura has also taken out injunctions to prevent press reporting of the incident and to prevent the leaking of internal documents which acknowledge the known toxicity of the waste.
Amnesty International is calling for a full inquiry into the incident, for which no individual has been punished or made to answer for their actions. More information on the case and the full report published by Amnesty today is available here: http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=20342.
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