the toxic truth - Greenpeace

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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. 596 135 Chapter 11
136 Amnesty internAtionAl And greenpeAce netherlAnds Chapter 11 Many people working for small businesses near dumpsites also appear to have been unable to access compensation for health impacts because they had to go to work to keep their jobs. A member of the workers’ union Collectif des Travailleurs de Vridi (a union which represents approximately 4,000 workers), told Amnesty International that many workers were not registered on the survey forms used by the government to record people who were exposed to the toxic waste. 597 The reasons for this varied: some employees went for medical consultations before the survey system was put in place; others did not go to public hospitals – some people also chose to self-medicate given the long queues and generic treatment given by medical facilities; in some cases employers would not allow workers time off to go for consultations because it would disturb production; some went to company doctors. A particular concern for these workers is that they were not given compensation by the government because they were not recorded on fiches, nor were they included in the compensation paid to companies, which went to the employers. These difficulties were compounded by the fact that, in some cases, medical teams saw patients but did not register them because the teams did not have any forms. For example, the doctor from MACA prison clinic testified that the fiches had only become available around a month after the dumping in mid- September 2006. As a result, although 1,780 victims had been treated in the prison clinic, only 400 fiches had been filled in. Furthermore, even those victims whose names were on the government compensation list often had difficulty in proving their identity. Some did not have official identity cards (or a certificate of parental authority in the case of minors). Others discovered that their compensation had already been collected by another individual with the same name. Compensation for loss of earnings and livelihood – flawed payment and distribution process The government scheme also allocated compensation to some, but not all, of the individuals and businesses that had suffered economic loss as a result of the dumping. The government registered a total of 849 individuals in the informal sector (farmers, breeders, garage owners, craftsmen and fishermen) and 33 affected businesses. 598 Salif Konate, the head of a collective of garage owners located near one of the dumping points, told Amnesty International that 120 garages had been forced to close temporarily in the weeks following the dumping. 599 He stated that only 17 of those garages had received compensation and that those who were compensated only received CFA250,000 (roughly US$500) 600 per garage, which was “insignificant” and would not even cover one day’s business activity. 601 A government assessment of the impact of the crisis later noted that hundreds of workers had been laid off and businesses had been closed as a result of the dumping. 602 However, while individual businesses and people who were self-employed in the informal sector were, to some extent, compensated, some employees of affected businesses appear to have faced a very difficult situation. If their workplace stayed open, they had to work next to the toxic waste and were often unable to access medical care, as described above. If the business closed, their employer could access compensation but the employees could not. After concluding his mission relating to the dumping of toxic waste in Côte d’Ivoire in 2007, the Special Rapporteur on toxic waste and human rights stated that:
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the toxic truth - Greenpeace

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