Human Rights advocacy
Pesticide testing on humans
Unethical practise violates international standards
The second circuit federal appellate court on Thursday will hear a challenge to an EPA rule that allows people to be used as guinea pigs in tests of toxic pesticides. The lawsuit, NRDC V. EPA was brought before the court by a coalition of environmental, farmworker and health groups in 2006. The groups contend that the agency's human testing rule violates a law passed by Congress in 2005 mandating strict ethical and scientific protections for pesticide testing on humans. “Testing poisons on people is unethical and against the law,” said Shelley Davis, deputy director of Farmworker Justice, a national advocacy and education center for migrant and seasonal farmworkers, based in Washington, D.C. “The EPA should stop accepting these industry funded tests.”
Previous human testing by industry produced serious ethical and scientific problems including one instance in which a company told participants they were eating vitamins, not toxic pesticides. In other instances citied in the lawsuit, researchers ignored the adverse health effects reported by the participants. “The only people who get what they want out of these immoral tests are the chemical companies,” said Aaron Colangelo, a Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) senior attorney representing the petitioners. “Their testing methods are questionable at best, the only purpose they serve is to weaken pesticide safety standards, and ultimately the people who grow and harvest our food suffer the consequences. This practice must end.” In 2005, Congress passed a law strictly forbidding the use of pregnant women and minors in pesticide tests. A loophole in the new EPA rule will allow testing of pregnant women, infants and children. Low-income people and students are the most likely to participate in these dangerous experiments, for which they usually receive a few hundred dollars. However, participants injured in the studies are not guaranteed medical care outside of the testing period. The groups contend the EPA rule violates international ethical standards enumerated in the 1947 Nuremburg Code by permitting the EPA to set safety standards based on tests conducted with only a handful of healthy people. In most tests, participants are not representative of the U.S. population, the test period is scientifically problematic, and group size is not large enough to detect potential harmful health effects.
The lawsuit was brought on behalf of the NRDC, the Pesticide Action Network of North America, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, Physicians for Social Responsibility, San Francisco Bay Area Chapter, Pineros y Campesinos del Noreste, and the Migrant Clinicians Network. Attorneys for the petitioners are NRDC, Farmworker Justice and Earthjustice.
The Natural Resources Defense Council is a national, nonprofit organization of scientists, lawyers and environmental specialists dedicated to protecting public health and the environment.
Child recruitment continues in over a dozen countries
The recruitment and use of children in armed conflict is taking place in more than one dozen countries around the world, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon states in a new report, calling for further measures to combat the scourge. The practice continues in Afghanistan, Burundi, Chad, the Central African Republic (CAR), Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines, Somalia, Sudan, Sri Lanka and Uganda, Mr. Ban notes in his latest report on children and armed conflict, covering the period from October 2006 to August 2007. On the positive side, he reports that no new cases of child recruitment have been recorded during that period in Côte d'Ivoire. The parties to the conflict there have not only ceased recruitment but have taken measures to identify and release children associated with them for rehabilitation, Mr. Ban writes. Regarding specific issues of concern, the Secretary-General points to the close link between child recruitment and internal displacement, noting that the lack of security around refugee and internally displaced person (IDP) camps and the "convenient concentration of vulnerable children" make these camps "prime recruiting grounds."
In addition, the Secretary-General notes that girls, and sometimes boys, are targeted with various forms of sexual and gender-based violence, including rape, during armed conflicts. For example, 60 per cent of cases of sexual and gender-based violence recorded in Kisangani, in northern DRC, involved victims between the ages of 11 and 17.
The report also sounds the alarm about armed groups moving across borders to recruit children from refugee camps, especially along the Sudan-Chad border. Both Sudanese and Chadian armed groups are recruiting children from Sudanese refugee camps in eastern Chad, while Chadian refugee children are being recruited by Sudanese rebel groups in Darfur.
Mr. Ban says the Security Council should consider a range of measures, including bans on military aid and travel restrictions on leaders, targeting parties to armed conflict who continue to systematically commit grave violations against children.
He also encourages the Council to refer violations against children in armed conflict to the International Criminal Court (ICC). In this regard, he points to "important precedents" set to end impunity for crimes against children. The Court has issued arrest warrants for five senior members of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), including its leader, Joseph Kony, who faces charges including the forcible enlistment and use of children in hostilities.
Source: UN News Service.
