Chlordecone scandal in the West Indies: end of the judicial information, towards a dismissal

Chlordecone poisoning in Guadeloupe and Martinique has had a profound effect on the West Indian population.

PA - Dominique Chomereau-Lamotte

Text by: RFI Follow

2 mins

After fifteen years of investigation into poisoning with chlordecone in Martinique and Guadeloupe, the investigating judges of the Paris court pronounced on March 25 the end of the investigations, without any questioning.

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The chlordecone affair began in 2006. At the time, a complaint was filed against the State for poisoning, endangering the lives of others and administering a harmful substance.

The French authorities are accused of having approved the use of chlordecone in Guadeloupe and Martinique until 1993, when it was banned in 1990 in mainland France for its dangerousness.

The pesticide had continued to be authorized, by ministerial derogation, in the banana fields of Martinique and Guadeloupe, which had caused significant and lasting pollution of the two islands.

According to Public Health France, more than 90% of the adult population of the two territories is contaminated by chlordecone. 

►To listen: Chlordecone scandal: how France contaminated more than 90% of the population of the Antilles?

The population of the two Caribbean islands today has one of the highest prostate cancer incidence rates in the world.

Linked to exposure to chlordecone, these tumors were recognized as an occupational disease in December 2021, paving the way for compensation for farmers and agricultural workers.

Towards a non-place?

But thirteen years after the opening of a judicial investigation within the public health center of the Paris court, the first results are in: the vast majority of the facts denounced in this chlordecone affair are already time-barred when the complaint is filed.

“

The turn taken by this scandalous affair is worrying, because we are moving towards a denial of justice”,

denounced Tuesday April 6 in a press release the lawyers of the association For an urban ecology, Raphaël Constant, Corinne Boulogne Yang-Ting, Ernest Daninthe and Georges Louis Boutrin.

The possible prescription of public action had already aroused emotion and indignation in the West Indies.

At the end of February 2021, between 5,000 and 15,000 Martiniquans marched in the streets of Fort-de-France to denounce the judicial process.

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To read also:

Chlordecone, a French poisoning

(

With AFP

)

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