Tran To Nga, during an interview with AFP in Hanoi, April 17, 2023 (AFP / Nhac NGUYEN)
Bayer-Monsanto and 13 other agrochemical groups cannot be tried in France for having designed or marketed the ultra-toxic defoliant “Agent Orange” used during the Vietnam War, the Paris Court of Appeal ruled on Thursday, deeming the claims of Tran To Nga, an 82-year-old Franco-Vietnamese woman, “inadmissible.”
“Ms Tran To Nga’s claims come up against the immunity from jurisdiction enjoyed by companies (…),” the appeals court wrote in its ruling.
The court upheld a judgment by the Evry judicial court, which had ruled in 2021 that the companies, including Bayer-Monsanto, Dow Chemical and Hercules, had “acted on the orders of and on behalf of the American state” and that they could therefore claim “immunity from jurisdiction”.
The octogenarian, who learned of the decision from Ho Chi Minh City, intends to appeal to the Court of Cassation, announced his lawyers, William Bourdon and Bertrand Repolt.
“We will continue to prove to the world that justice is on our side,” assured Ms Tran To Nga in an interview with the daily L’Humanité on Thursday evening, simply acknowledging a decision “which does not suit us.”
“More determined than ever,” she also indicated her intention to hold a press conference in France and call for “a rally.”
Born in French Indochina in 1942, Tran To Nga was a 24-year-old journalist when she was exposed to the defoliant used by the U.S. military to destroy Vietnamese forests that protected fighters from the communist Vietcong guerrillas, but which sickened more than three million people, according to Vietnamese government figures.
“The plane passed with a white cloud behind it. It fell very quickly and that’s how I found myself enveloped in a sticky liquid and, immediately, I started coughing, choking,” Tran To Nga recounted at a press conference in April.
– “Regrettable” for Hanoi –
His daughter, born in 1969, died of a heart defect after “17 months”, the group said, adding that his two other daughters and his grandchildren suffer from “serious pathologies”.
Tran To Nga suffers from “repeated tuberculosis, cancer and type II diabetes”, denounces Vietnam Dioxine.
“We find the court’s decision regrettable. We have often explained that although the war is over, its effects on the Vietnamese country and people are still being felt, including through the long-term consequences of Agent Orange,” Pham Thu Hang, spokesperson for the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry, told reporters.
“We fully support the victims who are demanding that the companies that produced and supplied Agent Orange used by the United States take responsibility and deal with the consequences,” she added.
The Vietnam Dioxine association, for its part, described the decision of the Paris Court of Appeal as a “denial of justice for the victims of Agent Orange” and assured that it would not “give up” in a press release.
In the United States, the fight against “Agent Orange” led in 1970 to the creation of the term “ecocide” to describe the deliberate destruction of the environment.
While veterans have been compensated by certain companies without a trial taking place, in 2005 the courts dismissed a Vietnamese victims’ association’s claim on the grounds that “Agent Orange” was a herbicide and not a chemical weapon.
Tran To Nga has turned to the French courts.
For companies that responded to orders from the American government, “there was no room for maneuver and the contract was a straitjacket,” Jean-Daniel Bretzner, Bayer-Monsanto’s lawyer, argued again in May before the Court of Appeal.
Denouncing “a matter of principle, the judges adopted a conservative attitude contrary to the modernity of law and to international law and European law”, argued Tran To Nga’s counsel.