The Evry court ruled inadmissible, Monday, May 10, the claims of Tran To Nga, a 79-year-old Franco-Vietnamese woman who was suing fourteen multinational agrochemicals as a victim of “Agent Orange”, a very toxic defoliant. used by the US military during the Vietnam War.
The court ruled in favor of the fourteen companies, considering that they were “Well-founded in availing itself of jurisdictional immunity”. The lawyer for the American company Monsanto (absorbed in 2018 by the German company Bayer), Jean-Daniel Bretzner, had thus argued that a French court was not competent to judge the action of a sovereign foreign state in part of a “Defense policy” in times of war.
The French justice considered, after examining the documents in the file, that the companies had acted well “By order and for the account of the American State, in the accomplishment of an act of sovereignty”, is it mentioned in the decision that Agence France-Presse (AFP) obtained.
46 million liters
From 1961 to 1971, more than 80 million liters of toxic defoliants were dumped by planes and helicopters over more than 2 million hectares of ancient Indochina, in order to destroy the lush vegetation and thus prevent enemies Americans, the forces of the South Vietnam Liberation Movement, to hide there.
One of these herbicides is “Agent Orange”, so named in reference to the colored bands painted on its storage drums. In ten years, 46 million liters have been sprayed. The hundreds of kilos of dioxin it contained contaminated the water and the vegetation; the poison descended into the soil, and gradually infiltrated the food chain – vegetables, fruits, milk, meat… – sowing disease and death for generations. Thousands of villages were sprayed with it; between two and five million people have been exposed to it.
Born in 1942 in French Indochina, Tran To Nga joined the independence movement in northern Vietnam and also covered the war (1955-1975) as a journalist. She says she was then exposed to the lasting effects of the ultratoxic chemical, nicknamed “Agent Orange”.
Since 2014, this Franco-Vietnamese grandmother has been leading a civil court battle against the 14 companies for having produced this compound. Tran To Nga says he suffers from pathologies ” characteristics “ exposure to the herbicide. Have type 2 diabetes with an allergy to insulin “Extremely rare”, she also contracted two tuberculosis, had cancer and one of her daughters died of a heart defect.