 Felly mae'n cael ei wneud y bydd cyfnod, ond mae'n rhan o'r 9 ymolio. A rydyn ni'n rhoi i gweld fod y ffrifig sydd eu rhan o'r optimus, a symud y bydd yn gwneud y ffilm a'r hynny rydyn ni'n gwneud yn ddechrau'r anhybun. Mae'r cyfnod i'r ysgrif, yma'r anhyfnid, yn anhyfuddio ar gyfer yna'r hynna'r dda. Yn rhan o'r hyn o, mae'n dda'r ddod yw'r arfer yn ddechrau, Felly mae'n cael ei wneud, ond here we are nine years later, and nothing substantive has shifted it. That's not the whole story, because not all of the optimism in the film was completely misplaced by meads, because six months after the anniversary scenes that you saw, both of us suddenly became a major national political issue in India. On the back of the criminal prosecution of seven Romani Indians accused in the ongoing criminal trial, so they were given two-year sentences under charges of criminal negligence, and from that moment a fraure erupted in India on the issue of the inequities and depredations of the entire 25 or more years so suddenly the Congress government at the time had to look like it was serious about doing something about these ongoing injustices. So as a consequence of the fraure eruplasted for about two or three months, suddenly both of us were a major election issue, and the Congress party at the time the individual ministers were being held to account on a regular basis, and obviously the opposition parties were making a lot of capital out of it, but the Indian government was forced to start talking as though it was going to seriously go out of doubt chemical, which until that time was proceeding un-molested and expanding its business in India apart from actions by survivors and their affiliated groups. So ministers started talking openly about trying to prosecute doubt for the contamination issue, trying to go out of the criminal case, and this provoked a response that was leaked to the press from one of President Obama's national security advisers, and it was an explicit threat to India's finance minister that the US would withhold its cooperation on an international grant that India was due to receive on the back of the doubt chemical issue quote. He basically said, I hope or we hope this is not going to create a chilling effect on our investment trade relationship. So this was a communication that was leaked to the press, and it gave a window really into what at that time was a very unclear level of US governmental obstructionism and complicity in the obstruction of justice for the survivors, and it's an issue that's become clearer in the intervening years since the film was made, and I'd like to talk more about that if people are interested when we do a Q&A session. As a result of the India government having to take action in 2010, 2011, it also filed several petitions in the courts. One of them has actually led to a potential revival of the scandalous and treacherous article settlement from 1989 that realised, as you saw from the film, compensation payouts of about $500 per victim, and 94% of the victims got figures that low from the compensation settlement. So there is an action in India's supreme court that is pending, and it's called a civil curative petition, and in that petition India is seeking an extra $1.2 billion in compensation from down union carbide. So this case, assuming it makes progress, has the potential to realise much needed monies for relief from rehabilitation measures in the city. And I heard just yesterday that the current Indian government has just filed an urgent application for hearing in that case. It's been languishing in the supreme court without being heard for about seven years, and the survivor groups are participants and they have legal status to add their arguments to the case that the government has put forward. What happened in 2010 also revived the pressure on Indian authorities to seriously pursue the criminal case against the foreign accused who have been upsconding since 1992, and as a result of that, an attachment order is issued against union carbide property, which unbeknows to the main population India union carbide set about circumventing immediately by establishing a third party trading entity through which they were able to funnel goods and services to Indian companies undercover of different guides to avoid attachment of their properties. That's been brought into the civil curatives. A clear act of fraud potentially allows parties to seek a way to pierce the corporate veil between down and union carbide. But the criminal cases, since the film was made, realised five different summons for down chemical which went through official governmental channels in India and the US. None of which have actually been physically served on down chemical by the US Department of Justice. Although India has an international law treaty to do with mutual legal assistance on criminal matters, the Department of Justice has completely ignored its obligations under the aegis of that international law framework and failed to serve any of those notices on down chemical. But the case continues and it continues to make life very uncomfortable for down. The good news is that whereas when the film was made in 2009, down was attempting to establish and open a brand new R&D centre in Maharashtra in India, they were attempting to make a major investment in Gujarat with an Indian past data company. The actions of survivor groups, of grassroots organisations in different parts of India and also the intervention of one or two political figures actually resulted in the company having to roll back those investments, losing something in the order of $375 million in the process. And we understand from private conversations that we know that the down chemical CEO had just quite recently. Down has been absolutely unable to pursue a direct investment programme in India. It's a market that's expanding at a huge rate of equipment to the market expansion in China. So it's having a direct impact on the company's bottom line, their inability to proceed with investments in this booming marketplace. So in other words, it's a real and live issue for them that although on the surface they're continuing to ignore, it's actually presenting extremely problematic strategic problems. The other good news, the film covered some scenes in one of the clinics that our charity, both our medical fields and UK-based charity supports from here, Chingari. At that time, they were in a very small building that were unable to see a dozen or two dozen children every day. That organisation is now over ten years old and they're providing essential services in the form of physiotherapy, speech therapy, special education, a nutrition programme, et cetera, to over 250 children every day. These are damaged kids from the worst impact to communities, kids who are born to either water or gas affected parents, sometimes both. These are kids that have nowhere else to go, they have no other services of that nature to turn to. And the successes they've been having are quite extraordinary. Something like 85 children from Chingari have now been able to attend normal schools. 96 kids, there was a very moving moment when a mother expresses the wish that her child could walk. Chingari has helped 96 children to walk for the first time in their lives. I recently wrote up a story of a boy called Surach who we first met in 2007. He had a very severe version of cerebral palsy. Up until the age of 18, he'd never walked a step in his life and hadn't spoken a single word. Last year at the age of 19, Chingari enabled him to say his mother's name for the first time and to walk the first steps of his life. He's now walking about 20 steps, he's interacting with staff at the clinic. He's now got a vocabulary group of about 15 words. Things are happening and at the ground level, really encouraging changes being made to individual people's lives by the survivor groups. A few have effectively had to take matters into their own hands. I'm going to round up and open up to questions. You mentioned that there's a good insight into learning how to track justice in the Obama community. Yes, and effectively, because of the terms of the legal treaty, I mean, just to roll back a second. The statement by Obama's National Security Advisor was one of the first publicly available documents that we had access to. We showed clear threat-making on behalf of the US government. We've since kind of gathered more circumstantial evidence. There were a number of cables that came through WikiLeaks, which showed diplomatic activity that was designed to thwart progress in the legal cases and mobile. We also got access to State Department cables from the 1970s, which showed that the US government was actually directly involved in lobbying Indian government ministers to obtain licensing for the plan at the build stage. So there's a good chance that the factory never would have been built had it not been for the intervention of US diplomatic officials, and in particular Henry Kissinger, who was head of the US State Department at that time. He facilitated a loan from a US export bank, the Etsin Bank, that went to Union Carbide, and that loan actually enabled Union Carbide India to be retained as a majority equity subsidiary of Union Carbide Corporation USA. Now that's important because the Union Carbide's management system was designed to achieve centralized, integrated management control of its overseas affiliates, and it was accomplishing that by maintaining majority equity. The company's majority holding in its Indian subsidiary was threatened at that time by Indian foreign exchange regulations from the early 70s. So the US government facilitated Union Carbide's circumvention of Indian regulations in order to retain majority equity control, but also to proceed with building this ultra-hazardous factory in the middle of a majorly populated city. Now Henry Kissinger pops up again because in the immediate aftermath of the disaster he by then formed a consultancy called Kissinger Associates, which included amongst its fellows a number of individuals who had gone on to serve under Reagan administrations in senior roles, and Union Carbide hired them from December the 11th. When Lawrence Eagleburger, for example, was put forward with the US State Department role in around 1990, Union Carbide gave him a personal reference for his FBI inquiry. So he served as head of state at exactly the same time that India was starting to pursue the criminal charges against the foreign accused, and we then find out that from members of the Indian investigative preservices at the time of CVI, which is an interval agency, we spoke to the former head of the agency who went on record to say that he had been explicitly ordered by an Indian ministry at that time not to pursue the foreign accused through the criminal case to basically put a block on those investigations. And two other heads of CVI from a similar period came forward to say they'd undergone the same treatment. So we start to see a picture of US governmental pressure and their outcomes at an Indian national policy level. When the court in Bhopal was pursuing the criminal summons against Dow Chemical between 2014 and 2017, and these summons were being put through official channels, the Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Laveress visited President Obama's White House more than 50 times. In that period, as a personal visitor of Obama. It's on the White House logs, I verified this. He was such a special friend of Obama, he was being invited to functions of state. If the Canadian Prime Minister came on a state visit and Laveress was among a select group of people invited to greet him and share drinks with the visiting dignitary. So quite clearly, Dow Chemical have been cultivating a strong relationship with that administration. But it goes back because quite apart from a lot of Siegelberger and Reagan, there were eight years after that under President Bill Clinton when Bill Clinton's best friend in Washington was a lawyer called Bernard Jordan who didn't have an official role in Washington but was effectively a go-between in Clinton's right hand man. And he served on the board of a number of US corporations, one of whom was Union Carbide. So during that entire period of time when the Indian government and the Indian courts were foot dragging over, rigorously and vigorously pursuing the criminal case against the foreign accused, there was a Union Carbide chairman, sorry not chairman, a director whispering in the ear of the US president over that eight years. When George W. Bush got into power in 2001, he had considered another Dow Chemical director at the time, they'd just taken over Carbide as his vice presidential running mate, another Dow Chemical board member Barbara Franklin raised $25 million for his presidential campaign. So the ties between the companies and various US administrations was incredibly deep. We tried to, we used right to information to try to get documents out of US governmental sources to verify some of our suspicions about the extent of the obstruction and we've only been successful in getting about 24 pages of documents out of hundreds of files. The rest have either been refused access or they've been heavily redacted. So they're clearly covering something up. In the field, for a layperson it's a field like it was not assessed, the emotional point that there's an obvious connection between the building to the gas and the interest suffered by the death of the interest of my children. So the interest of my children, the only reference I called in the field was a statistical reference. Have there been any studies that would currently stand out and put a law to show the connection between these help to the major disabilities and the release of gas, particularly on these young children? That's a good question and it's been incredibly difficult to get solid substantial information on that issue over the years and I'll explain why. There are a number of preliminary and fairly small studies undertaken by an Indian government agency called the Indian Council of Medical Research in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. That was from 1985 onwards. So they looked at impacts in particular on genetic material in gas survivors. So they identified breaks and problems with chromosomes in a select group that were at breaks three or four times the unaffected population and they followed that up and found developmental disorders in a number of children who'd been born subsequent to their parents being gas exposed. Some of them were in the womb at the time of their parents gas exposure. There was a subsequent study that wasn't published but the problem was in the early 1990s the government ceased funding and effectively wound up program 24 different medical studies and put a ban on their public publication. This was at a time when the government was still getting heat from the outrageous terms that they'd agreed for the civil settlement of the Unicard by having to be bullied into it by the company's attempts to threaten breach of due process in the unique cause. It was a sort of damoclies that they'd managed to acquire through a preliminary process in the US courts where the US courts had effectively said that if the due process rights were breached in the Indian context then potentially they could bring the case back to the US forum. These preliminary studies were quite small in nature. We only found out about nine months ago that the state government had initiated its own programme study and had identified two and a half thousand developmental disorders in the 1990s to which it attempted to address with a short programme of addressing cyanotic heart defects so around 36 kids got heart operations at that time paid for by the state authorities but after that was virtually nothing but the clinic that we support in Bhopal Sambadna which has been in place now since 1996, 22 years old, has deep ties in the affected communities because it's had a programme of community outreach work for over two decades also has had itself undertaken a massive epidemiological study which began around five or six years ago so they have taken in over 20,000 families, rigorously taking data on all kinds of conditions of 20,000 families, one of which is a control group of course. There are groups who are gas affected, gas and water affected, water affected control group and the data is being processed through internet by international experts and we're hoping that eventually the data is going to make it into peer reviewed international journals sometime hopefully before the 35th anniversary next year but preliminary findings in that data suggest that developmental disorders, but the effect of genital disorders are running at rates four or five times the national average in the affected communities. Yes. What do you see? Is there a role that puts the book international law very good in this case so if we haven't seen the individual that comes with a strong regional human rights system so this case can't be checked with EHR in Europe or inter-american or human rights obviously you would have issues like the ICC you can take it there and with the ICJ I was thinking you were talking about there was a bilateral treaty between the US and India concerning... Mutual assistance on criminal matters. With that, could that be a case... I mean I know this is one really small part, or this is called criminal proceedings, but could that go to the ICJ? Is that anything that's very criminal or really helpful? It certainly hasn't been investigated and I'm something of a dilettante on the subject of international law there is somebody in the room that would be able to speak much more clearly with knowledge than I can on the subject but my understanding and it's a crude one is that there is no international law mechanism in existence through which any of these matters could actually be subject to judicial proceedings they simply don't exist. There have been attempts obviously through international agencies like the UN in recent years to try and create a framework by which judicial mechanisms can be created but the last such effort resulted in the global compact that the UN agreed in 2011 which you're probably familiar with, which is a set of guidelines and procedures which are not legally enforceable. I mean that's my crude understanding but I'm open to it. Is there a case that's so interesting that it really comes along with the huge issue of international law that there is a complete lack of accountability for non-state actors? Absolutely. Andy, what they were saying about how they don't complicate themselves as being liable under US jurisdiction or Indian jurisdiction where you honestly always hope you ridiculous they do come within those jurisdictions in different areas they're really acting within the community. Precisely. In the same way that Shell has been outside of large rather large international corporations? Yes, absolutely. And I guess one of the reasons it's been so hard to re-get anywhere from the foreign national authorities because this would set such a large international president and that's really not what people want, we're not people want. Thanks, you're just supposed to give them my response because they hit the nail on the head in several directions. I'll dig just on the question of the jurisdiction. I didn't talk myself in the national world. It's actually right that there is no forum for this to happen certainly as far as the ITJ is concerned. I think you're right that basically it's a question of states the opportunity to take cases and agree with the other side in any case of course your point is entirely right as far as non-state actors are concerned but in a way I think that international law is a bit of a great area and the issue is that the workplace in India and the jurisdiction of India is frankly self-evident and I don't think you have to be a lawyer, a lawyer and international lawyer to appreciate that and that is where international law comes in politically. The American government that demonstrated and well filmed by Tim's presentation has been enormously influential likely between the Indian government to not to pursue it. The Indian court that hence the settlement was made many years ago that's a matter of international law for you in a way because international law is highly political then extremely amorous, extremely good. I'm sure you appreciate it. In most cases let alone in a case like this. Yes, I agree with the previous comments a very important film that you've shown. What I would say is that perhaps one area where we should at least have power though with so many areas, obviously Fukushima, most obviously because of the reactors in America when those reactors were being developed and had research institutions suggested that there was programs meltdown and that was actually suppressed and when they were sold to the Japanese they were sold on zero, one or two. Actually the Indians when they bought reactors from America they didn't buy them on a zero, one or two basis. They bought them specifically on the political aim principle and yet this whatever relationship they had in this case has not served them and they really sold their population now because they had the Anderson and the like in a cell and they obviously let it go and they would have known that it's going to explode. But for me what is really revealing about this whole panatholi of events is that it raises questions about our democratic culture because it would take the UK as an instrument but a few people in England, wider nations in Scotland would know that we have the highest stockpiles of plutonium in the whole wide world. We have 40% of the plutonium in the whole wide world and the reason why we don't know is because the industry and the state operates inclusion and they suppress this kind of information and this is how we are governed in India it's not dissimilar to the UK, it's not dissimilar to China or to the US or Russia or whatever and yet whenever we have research symposia we always contrast the Koreans, the North Koreans and the Russians of ourselves but actually what is most definable is how in coalition we all are in our various governments. I can't agree with what you were saying. I think one of the activists put it really well at a time when the buzzword for international economics and law and processes was globalization and he said that an incident like Bhopal provides a window into the process of globalization that still pertains I think. I'm interested in how the Bhopal-Rachafodge-Millianos allocated how that was done. What was the split between actually the Bhopal-Rachafodge-Millianos and some of the Bhopal-Rachafodge-Millianos and what happened? No, much of the rehabilitation cost of Bhopal has been socialized. It's fallen upon the Indian taxpayer because the national government has had to give I think a last estimate around $350 million that's given that to the state government to put into rehabilitation schemes so economic social rehabilitation there hasn't been hardly anything spent on environmental rehabilitation and that only through Supreme Court initiatives in the last five or six years and then it was a very hotch potch kind of effort and I'm not exaggerating here an Indian company called Ranki used women in saris with handmade brooms to sweep pesticide dust out of the warehouses on the side. This is hexachlorocycler hexane particles thrown up into the air by people with no protective clothing whatsoever. That's the extent of the Indian government's cleanup effort. Basically they moved the waste that were on the surface that were already containing buildings into one other building. Nothing's been done about the real problem which is under the ground where the company was indiscriminately dumping and burying it while the factory was in operation. Is it done to the right amount of cost of what it's going to take to get it? The Indian government has blocked international agencies in recent years from figuring out how much it's going to cost because it's an ever-expanding problem and the film has mentioned that the contamination is three kilometres out. Just a year ago, some barb in us submitted water tests to the Supreme Court which showed that there were industrial contaminants used in processes of factory more than five kilometres out now in community well water. So the Supreme Court had accepted 22 communities were exposed to contaminants through their water supplies. From those tests it's gone up to 42. It's almost doubled. So it's now over 100,000 people that are reached by the contamination. The Indian government has put a penny into that but they have put into rehabilitation schemes, economic and social and medical because they've been funding medical care. But that's... Absolutely. The source, you're just going to class and you're going to cut the amount. Yes. I'm sure there's more if you do pungent more benefits to the people, but I'll tell you the quality of both gases. Yes, the ongoing exposure. So there's the fact that MIHC exposure, one time MIHC exposure in 1984 caused profound impacts on the entire system. That has come out of the medical studies that have been released from the 80s and the 90s. So MIHC crossed the form of your barrier, got into the bloodstream, went around the body, hitched onto a protein called glucosubene, I think it was. It could be wrong there. But then sort of broke down in different parts of the body in cancer damage. So we're seeing lots of kidney and liver damage now. Obviously cancers are hugely on the rise and so Wagner has been documenting some of that. The official cancer registry, the state-run cancer registry has been deliberately downplaying the figures and finessing the data as well and there's evidence of that. So the Indian government has spent not far off the money that the Indian government provided in reparation, as it were, in a one-time settlement. And the money that went to survivors, in the end they got two payments, $500 each, because interest accumulated over 15 years. It took so long. The dispersal scheme and categorisation scheme took so long. The survivors were still receiving compensation, something like 18, 19 years after union carbide and paid that money in 1987. Has a bit much involvement in large dispatch measures at Wagner's new labor force? Yes. I mean, Greenpeace did the first major study of the contaminants in 1999. That study was incredibly important at the time. They made some follow-up studies and gave some recommendations and brought in some reputable scientists. But then they abandoned the campaign in about 2002 and they haven't really looked at it since. They just moved on, policy they moved away from toxics at that time and they haven't really come back. They weren't particularly respectful to be honest of the local, the grassroots communities at the time and they effectively plastic Greenpeace branding over everything they did in Bokell and tended to blank out the work that communities were doing on exposing these issues. So it wasn't a great collaboration but we had much better experiences with Amnesty International who have been working with these survivor organisations since around 2002-2003 to produce reports, studies that stand up to scrutiny and cover the extent of the impacts on a broad range of human rights. But also Amnesty are limited in terms of the amount of tyre resources they can give an issue like this, which is now 34 years old. So in terms of what I'm going to support now, a couple of years ago one of the UN's current special rapporteurs, Basker Tonsap, has been very helpful. He's a rapporteur on hazardous waste and he's made some very strong statements and he was involved in an effort to get the United Nations Environmental Program to go to Bokell to do a thoroughgoing scientific assessment of the contamination. So UNEP actually agreed and committed to doing that but they needed to take permission from the government and that, I think it was two and a half years ago now they wrote to the relevant ministry and they were refused permission outright without any explanation to go to Bokell to conduct that testing. So in the absence of a picture of the spread of the contamination no work can begin to remediate it. Politically are the survivors independently organised at all. So have they had any success at all in elections, either in the Indian State elections or in the Indian National elections of people who are generally sympathetic? Yes, I think certainly in the early years Bokell was a major issue at national level so a number of high status Indian national politicians got involved in trying to move things at parliamentary level and bringing about rallies trying to move things at a legislative level as well. India got its environment act in 1987 which in part was a response to Bokell but there are also other less obvious legislative changes that happened but certainly over the last couple of decades there have been some politicians who have run against the grain there was a minister of chemicals and fertilisers who was a real thorn in the side of Dow Chemical for the years that he was in power because he was responsible for putting an application into the State High Court that Dow pay a sum of money $22 million in year of determination of liability to begin the process of decontaminating the plan Dow, of course, haven't paid that money so that's still pending in the High Court and he also was involved in refusing commission for investment projects as well so he was some of the event you are for Dow for a number of years and then most recently survivor organisations took a campaign out in state elections this was the last couple of months state elections happened in Bangladesh last week respecting the results on Monday, I think it is and they effectively pledged there are a number of constituencies that have a very high proportion of gas and water affected people who pledged their votes to any candidate who was going to promise to pursue fresh compensation awards and to help stimulate the curative petition so they did get some pledges but it remains to be seen what happens as a result, in 2008 a group of 250 survivors walked all the way to Delhi on foot to Palliatra set up camp in Jantamanta in Delhi took actions against the Prime Minister's residents changed themselves to his fence met, did lots of lobbying with national politicians managed to get a private meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the time who promised them to their faces a national commission on vote power that would be empowered made up of relevant experts in conference with the survivor organisations and this body would be empowered to intervene in environmental, social economic rehabilitation schemes in the city rather than leaving it to what's proven to be a very corrupt local administration at the state level and so he made this face to face promise there was a meeting of ministers on vote power that created a preliminary document and then nothing else happened and that's now, you know, 10 years ago and of course that party is long out of power now You said something happened yesterday Was that positive? Well it's potentially positive but I must provide some depressing context to that so the curative petition that was initiated by Congress party government in 2010 it received one hearing or two hearing wanted to allow it to go forward and then an initial hearing in 2011 and so arguments were presented it's been pending ever since so we heard yesterday that the national government, the current national government has filed an urgent application for hearing in that case it had been listed for hearing a number of times and they hadn't heard for whatever reason so that's positive on the one hand but on the other hand in the intervening years the companies down-eating carbide have submitted a series of arguments in April 4 which the advocate that we work with in Delhi who's looked at this paperwork says it's a pile three or four feet off the floor and the Indian government to support its own case has filed around 25 pages in response so there is this incredible inequality of arms in terms of the arguments that have been brought forward to support that legal initiative which anyway was a long shot because it depends upon case law that was established in 2002 that has only been successfully pursued I think on two occasions so yeah it's a bit of a shot in the dark but it's a major case it's provided a forum actually for the survivor organisations to present a lot of the background history that have not been brought before the courts before so I'm going to make public documents of those issues and how are the various survival groups all part of our cognitive argument on straight efforts? They have weekly meetings in Bhopal there are I think five groups that meet weekly there are two other quite large survivor organisations that they coordinate with when there are important issues to address as well and international supporters that they coordinate with the grassroots organisations under the rubric of the ICJB the international campaign for justice in Bhopal which at the moment is staffed entirely by a loose network of volunteers Thank you very much Well coming in