Castries, Saint Lucia, in the West Indies (illustration).

-

BR PRODUCTIONS / SIPA

A complaint filed 14 years ago for chlordecone poisoning by associations from Martinique and Guadeloupe could fall under the prescription, they indicated, this Thursday, after a hearing at the TGI in Paris.

Three associations from Martinique and four from Guadeloupe were heard on Wednesday and Thursday by videoconference by two investigating judges from the health center of the TGI in Paris, 14 years after the filing of their complaint for "endangering the lives of others" .

More than 90% of the population of the Antilles contaminated with chlordecone

They had filed a complaint in 2006 against the poisoning of their islands with chlordecone, a pesticide banned in France in 1990 but which continued to be authorized in the banana fields of Martinique and Guadeloupe by ministerial exemption until 1993. More than 90% of the adult population in Guadeloupe and Martinique is contaminated by chlordecone, according to Public Health France, and the West Indian populations have one of the highest incidence rate of prostate cancer in the world.

The examining magistrates informed the associations that evidence had disappeared and that the file could be under the blow of a limitation, declared the Martinique associations to the local media at the end of the hearing.

"It's been 14 years that it hangs out in their courts and today we are told that the facts are prescribed?

It is not our doing!

", Was carried away Pascal Tourbillon, representing ASSAUPAMAR (Association for the Protection of Martinican Heritage) at the microphone of RCI radio.

Soon a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights?

Maître Louis Boutrin, the lawyer for the Association for Urban Ecology based in Martinique, asks for his part that we close the instruction as soon as possible to proceed to indictments and specifies that "there is today '' reports from the DGCCRF (General Directorate for Competition, Consumption and Fraud Control) which were not taken into account, which are offenses committed in 2006 and which make it possible to push back the limits of prescription ”.

The associations mobilized in Martinique, the AMSES (the Medical Association for the Protection of the Environment and Health), the ASSAUPAMAR and the Association for an Urban Ecology, are now planning to seize the European courts in particular the European Court of Human rights.

Society

Chlordecone: The State, "first responsible" for pollution in the West Indies, according to a parliamentary report

Planet

Chlordecone, a poison present for "generations" in West Indian soil

  • Pesticides

  • Complaint

  • Guadeloupe

  • Martinique

  • Chlordecone scandal

  • West Indies

  • Justice