the toxic truth - Greenpeace

the toxic truth
that not all of this money has been paid out
to victims, and some victims may not have
received any compensation. The last available
government figures are from 2008. According
to these data only 63 per cent of victims
recorded by the government as having suffered
health impacts received payouts; it seems,
however, from the figures that over 90 per cent
of those recorded as having suffered economic
loss received compensation. 592 The status of
the social and community projects that the
compensation money was intended to fund
has never been clarified. Amnesty International
has asked the present government to provide
information on these projects and on the
present status of the compensation fund. At
the time of printing, no information had been
received.
Compensation for health impacts – a flawed
payment and distribution process
In June 2007, four months after the
settlement was agreed, the government began
the process of distributing compensation to
victims of the waste dumping. The government
drew up a list of 95,247 victims who were
entitled to compensation and divided these
individuals into three categories:
1) the families of those who had died; 2) the
“walking ill”; and 3) people who had been
hospitalized. 593
Under the first category, relatives of the
16 individuals whom the state recorded as
having died due to exposure to the waste
received the largest payout of CFA100 million
each (around US$205,000). Under the
third category, the 75 individuals who had
been recorded as hospitalized following the
dumping were allocated CFA2 million (around
US$4,000) each. 594
Under the second category, over 95,000
people classified as “walking ill”, who had
been seen by one of the emergency medical
teams, were allocated lower payouts of
CFA200,000 each (around US$400). 595
Overall, the method used by the government
to categorize the harm suffered by victims in
order to facilitate compensation was flawed.
Neither the second nor third categories took
into consideration the severity of the harm
suffered or the possibility of any long-term
consequences or whether victims would
require medical services in the future.
Furthermore, medical services were not
available for all victims. The emergency
response of the Ivorian authorities was
commendable under the circumstances,
but over-stretched and under-resourced. As
a consequence, many affected individuals
did not have access to medical centres in
the immediate aftermath of the dumping.
Therefore, any negative health impacts they
suffered were not officially recorded.
After the government compensation scheme
was announced at the end of June 2007,
there were demonstrations by victims to
protest against the low level of payouts and
the fact that the government was keeping the
bulk of the settlement money. There were also
many complaints of victims being left out of
the scheme.
The authorities used the medical forms (or
fiches) that had been completed during the
medical emergency as the basis for drawing
up the list of victims entitled to receive
compensation. However, this led to a number
of problems because these forms were not
originally created for this purpose. The medical
forms only took into account those who had
been registered at one of the designated
state hospitals or by one of the emergency
medical teams. This meant that those who had
not seen a doctor, or who sought treatment
privately or from traditional healers, were
automatically excluded from the scheme. Exact
figures vary, but it seems that a substantial
number of people were excluded from the
compensation scheme on this basis. A survey
conducted by Ligue Ivoirienne des Droits de
l’Homme (LIDHO) found that only 35 per cent of
the victims had been registered by the state. 596
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Chapter 11