ISLAMABAD/NEW DEHLI: India’s Supreme Court has rejected a plea seeking more compensation for the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster victims.
The matter could not be “raised three decades after the settlement,” the court ruled. Thousands died after a leak from Union Carbide’s Madhya Pradesh state capital plant.
A settlement reached in 1989, according to Dow Chemicals, which acquired Union Carbide in 1999, was just and binding. The Bhopal gas accident is regarded as the worst industrial catastrophe ever.
According to the Indian government, 3,500 people passed away within days of the gas spill, and more than 15,000 died in the following years. Campaigners claim there were up to 25,000 fatalities and that the effects of the gas are still being felt today.
An Indian court found seven former plant managers guilty in 2010, and they were sentenced to minor fines and brief prison terms. But many campaigners and victims have felt justice against Union Carbide has not been served.
The matter so far
Union Carbide, in 1989, agreed to pay $470m (£386.5m) to settle the initial fight for compensation. The government argued that the survivors had asked for $3.3bn (£2.7bn). The victims appealed the judgment in the Supreme Court, which upheld the settlement but ordered Union Carbide to fund a hospital for victims costing about $17m.
Following criticism over the former executives of UCIL obtaining only two-year prison sentences and minor penalties, the government reconsidered the pay in June 2010.
The attorney general of India filed a curative petition, asking the case to be reopened and to increase the settlement to $1.1bn.
The state argued the initial compensation was based on incorrect figures and failed to capture the enormity of damage caused to human lives and the environment. The petition demanded that the successor firms of Union Carbide should pay additional compensation.
The Supreme Court, however, rejected the argument on Tuesday, stating that it “lacked merits on the facts of this case” and was “not maintainable in law.”
The five-judge Constitution bench ruled that the issue of compensation could not be brought up three decades after the settlement.
