Thailand Fails To Clean Lead-Poisoned Creek Despite Court Order - Rights Group

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Thailand fails to clean lead-poisoned creek despite court order - rights group

 

http://www.trust.org/item/20141216085411-zkkz5/

 

BANGKOK, Dec 16 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Hundreds of families in western Thailand are suffering from lead poisoning near a polluted creek that the government has failed to clean up despite a court order two years ago, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday.

 

In 1998, Lead Concentrates (Thailand) closed a mine in Klity Creek in Kanchanaburi province, but the 400 or so ethnic Karen subsistence farmers living in a nearby village struggle with health problems and continue to fight for a cleanup, the watchdog group said in a report.

 

In what activists hailed as a landmark ruling, the Supreme Administrative Court in January 2013 ordered the government to pay $125,000 in compensation and clean up the site.

 

"This is a test case for whether rule of law really means anything in Thailand when the poor and powerless take on a state agency that has been negligent," Phil Robertson, HRW's deputy director for Asia, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

 

"If the (Pollution Control Department) can defy an order from the Supreme Administrative Court without facing severe consequences, it spreads the word that government agencies can do what they want."...