More on Trafigura, and how it goes under-reported in the media...

Trafigura, or how can people be that evil toward their own kind. After looking for some time I found more material to read on Trafigura and it's shameful action in Ivory Cost about 3 years ago.

In a previous post I related the great documentary produced by Al Jazeera, but I just found out that BBC had also produced another report, which is just as good.
Or I should rather say 'devastating' instead of 'great', as the topic is absolutely horrible. It is even hard to conceive that such evilness can be so easily done to men. Well I guess we tend to forget rather too rapidly the many examples that spot our history, from Hitler to Rwanda and Cambodia and Armenia and Guantanamo and Darfour and Palestine and Northen Uganda and ... The list goes on.

Coming back to Trafigura, I was quite glad to see that Al Jazeera wasn't the sole media to report this case.

But this was before discovering this article from The Guardian in which we learn that Trafigura is doing it's best to shut down any report made on them. Apparently they are trying to sue BBC for showing this documentary which is supposedly alleging false claims about Trafigura's abuses.
In the same time there is a huge PR campaign going on to make the company look better, while many journalists are being threatened not to write about the scandal.

But here and there some stories are being published. Of interest is one from the Financial Time on the question of the US Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789 which allows anyone to sue any company in the world against alleged human rights crimes in a US court - or at least it is being interpreted that way.
Apparently it is becoming more and more common to see huge multinational corporations being held accountable for their abuses of the international laws' loopholes. It has notably been used in the case of the Ogoni people in Nigeria against the Royal Dutch Shell Company, and the trial is taking place right as I speak.


(photos: NYTimes)

The Enigmatic Worthlessness of Justice?

I just found out about a new case of justice's worthlessness... This is a documentary from Al Jazeera on the case of Trafigura, the world's third largest oil trading company. According to Wikipedia - I'm not [yet] an academic - Trafigura last year had a turnover of US$73bn, or more than the double of Côte d'Ivoire's GDP last year (US$34bn), which gives an indication on what we are talking about.

The documentary is about the trial case between the people in Abidjan and Trafigura in which the oil trading company dumped toxic wastes next to villages all around Abidjan, resulting in sicknesses and deaths.

Apparently Martyn Day, the British lawyer defending the Côte d'Ivoire people, is fairly confident on the outcome of the trail that's gonna take place in October 2009. Yet I liked very much what he pointed out:

"But what I think has not worked quite well is the strong desire within Abidjan to see trafiquers itself in the dock in which it would have to defend the charges about what it did."

Yet I hope people in Abidjan win and finally get some proper compensations to deal with their legacy of sicknesses from Trafigura... And thant you Al Jazeera and Juliana Ruhfus for this documentary.