August 20th, 2019
The UN Human Rights Committee has issued one of its most important environmental decisions to date, calling on the Paraguayan government to undertake an investigation into the poisoning of citizens and contamination of water, soil, and food by agrochemicals fumigation.
In a landmark
decision published last Wednesday, the Committee urged Paraguay to
prosecute those responsible, to make full reparation to victims, and to publish
its decision in a daily newspaper with a large circulation. The Committee has requested
Paraguay to report back within 180 days detailing the measures it had been
taken to implement the decision.
The 18 members of the Committee monitor the adherence of 173 states party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Paraguay also signed up to an optional protocol to the covenant that gives people the right to complain to the Committee against states that violate their human rights.
Under this right, members of farming
families from the Curuguaty province complained that the application of
pesticides to soy farms in the area caused many individuals to become ill and
caused the death of one person. The Curuguaty area has seen a major expansion in
agribusinesses and mechanized cultivation of genetically modified soybeans in
recent years.
Victims, the decision states, have experienced nausea, dizziness, headaches, fever, stomach pains, vomiting, diarrhea, coughing, and skin lesions. The contamination, the Committee said, has so far resulted in the death of one person and the poisoning of 22 other inhabitants of this community.
Large-scale toxic chemicals use
In 2011, the concerned citizens filed an Amparo –a remedy for the protection of constitutional rights – and the Paraguayan courts found that the Ministry of the Environment and the National Plant and Seed Quality and Health Service had allowed serious physical harm by failing to protect citizens.
Both institutions, however, failed
to act on the Court’s order to ensure the protection of environmental resources
and to ensure that buffer zones are enforced to separate spraying areas from
human settlements and waterways. To date, there has been no redress of the harm.
This influenced the UN Committee’s
decision to find that Paraguay did not exercise adequate controls over illegal
polluting activities from heavy toxic agrochemical spraying that pose a reasonably
foreseeable threat to victims’ lives.
The Committee also found that soybean
producers located next to the victims’ home are still applying large amounts of
agrochemicals without environmental permits. Therefore, the Committee declared
that there was a violation of the right to life and the right to private life,
family and home.
According to the Committee’s decision, the large-scale use of toxic agrochemicals in the region has also caused contamination of water resources and aquifers, preventing the use of streams and causing the loss of fruit trees, the death of farm animals and severe crop damage.
Landmark decision
Hélène Tigroudja, a member of the UN Committee, said that it has issued a “landmark decision” in favour of the recognition of the link between severe harms to the environment and the enjoyment of core civil and political rights.
“Hundreds of similar cases around
the world could be submitted for our consideration. We deeply encourage States
to protect the right to life understood as the right to enjoy a life with
dignity against environmental pollution,” she said.
According
to Professor John Knox, who served as the first-ever UN Special Rapporteur on
human rights and the environment from 2012 to 2018, the decision is the first time
that a treaty body has “so clearly stated that a State’s failure to protect
against environmental harm can violate its obligations to protect rights of
life and of private/family life”.
“It
will be a precedent cited in many subsequent cases,” he said in a long
thread on the topic on Twitter, adding that the Commission’s statement has “implications”
for all 173 Convention parties.
“Although the Human Rights Committee’s decisions aren’t binding, it’s usually awkward and embarrassing for countries to ignore or discount them. And the decisions may be taken into account by other courts that do have binding authority,” he said.
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