David Rohde cont’d and Trafigura’s “super injunction”

October 28, 2009

By Brianna Lee

To follow up on the David Rohde story, here’s a great interview he had on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday with Terry Gross.

In other news, last week, a five-week legal battle between oil trader Trafigura and the UK’s Guardian newspaper came to a close when Trafigura ended a secret injunction with the news organization. How did this all start?

In 2006, a scientific study eventually called the Minton Report began to collect evidence that Trafigura was dumping toxic waste in the waters of the Cote d’Ivoire. The report was commissioned when hundreds of people in the Cote d’Ivoire claimed to have been poisoned and flooded the hospitals. In more detail:

The Minton report – though it was preliminary in nature – made dismaying reading for Claude Dauphin, the Trafigura director in charge of oil preparations. It said the process had been so amateurish that it had probably left a high quantity of noxious sulphur compounds in the vast quantity of stinking black waste.

Minton went on to list half a dozen potentially unstable chemical compounds which could burn or poison people who came into contact with them. Some of them could also generate the killer gas hydrogen sulphide in certain conditions.

Minton said such waste could never have been dumped legally on a landfill in Europe and ought to have received specialist and expensive chemical treatment called “wet air oxidation” to make it safe. None of this had happened.

Among the effects of the sludge, Minton listed: severe burns to the skin and to the lungs; permanent ulceration; corneal damage; vomiting, diarrhoea, loss of consciousness and death. One of the chemicals was branded “very toxic to humans and dangerous to the environment”.

About a month ago, The Guardian got word of this report. Trafigura, claiming the report’s evidence was preliminary and inaccurate, went to lengths to file an injunction on The Guardian effectively prohibiting them from publishing the content and findings of the Minton Report. And not only that, but they also filed what has become known as a “super injunction” – a gag order banning The Guardian from even disclosing that they were under an injunction. News of the Minton Report still got out in cyberspace, particularly in Wikileaks, and was circulated madly on Twitter. (For a full story of how the news leaked all over the Internet, refer to the Online Journalism Blog).

But finally, largely under pressure by social media networks and blogging communities, Trafigura released The Guardian from the injunction, and the super injunction. They even admitted that the waste could have caused a “range of short term low level flu like symptoms and anxiety.”

The obvious takeaway – in a social media world, important news is becoming even tougher to suppress. But this is still food for thought about the current state of press freedom – even in the UK – and of course, about the role of companies like Trafigura and their environmental responsibility.