For lack of evidence, two Parisian investigating judges on Monday dismissed the long-term investigation into the poisoning of the West Indies with chlordecone. A judicial source confirmed to AFP on Thursday this decision of high symbolic value, which was also requested by the Paris prosecutor’s office in its requisitions at the end of November, and was feared by elected officials and inhabitants of Martinique and Guadeloupe, who have regularly denounced a risk of “miscarriage of justice”.
According to elements of the dismissal order, the two investigating magistrates recognize a “health scandal”, in the form of “an environmental attack whose human, economic and social consequences affect and will affect daily life for many years. inhabitants” of Martinique and Guadeloupe. But they dismiss the case, citing the difficulty of “reporting criminal evidence of the facts denounced”, “committed 10, 15 or 30 years before the filing of complaints”, the first having been in 2006.
No definite causal link
The magistrates also underline “the state of technical or scientific knowledge” at the time when the facts were committed: “the bundle of scientific arguments” at the beginning of the 1990s “did not make it possible to say that the certain causal link required by criminal law” between the substance in question on the one hand and the impact on health on the other, “was established”.
Also advancing various obstacles related to the law, its interpretation and its evolution since the time of use of chlordecone, the magistrates attest to their “concern” to obtain a “judicial truth”, which however resulted in an impossibility to ” characterize a criminal offence”.
Used in banana plantations to fight against the weevil, chlordecone was authorized in Martinique and Guadeloupe until 1993, under derogation, when the rest of French territory had banned its use. It caused significant and long-lasting pollution of the two islands and is suspected of having caused a wave of cancers.